Project description
New clues to galaxy formation during the universe’s first billion years
The first billion years of the universe were a period of rapid galaxy formation, yet how these galaxies grew so quickly remains a mystery. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that early galaxies were unexpectedly massive and matured fast, challenging current models of galaxy evolution. To understand this rapid growth, the ERC-funded FIRST-GIANTS project will analyse high-quality spectra from the JWST, focusing on early massive galaxies. Researchers will combine advanced kinematic and stellar population models to determine galaxy masses, structures, star formation histories and the role of active galactic nuclei. These findings will be integrated into cosmological models to uncover how galaxies assembled in dark matter haloes and how star formation was regulated.
Objective
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed that galaxies in the first billion years of the Universe are maturing surprisingly fast. Massive galaxies outnumber predictions, appear to have high stellar mass densities, host massive black holes and in some cases disky morphologies.
Understanding this rapid assembly is crucial: the abundance of early massive galaxies would pose a major challenge for current galaxy formation models in the ΛCDM framework. However, these results remain contentious, as they are primarily based on broad-band photometric samples, interpreted with stellar population models that were calibrated in the local Universe. The masses, nature and space density of the candidate massive galaxies therefore are highly uncertain.
To determine how galaxies could grow so rapidly requires a comprehensive approach: high-quality spectra for a large set of candidate massive galaxies, combined with novel modelling to obtain dynamical masses, robust stellar masses and star formation histories, and to identify active galactic nuclei (AGN). As PI of a large ongoing spectroscopic JWST program, I have obtained the first spectra that reveal early massive galaxies in unprecedented detail, along with a broader ‘context sample’ of several thousand galaxies. I have developed the necessary kinematic modelling tools to get dynamical masses of early galaxies, and have tailored stellar population models in place.
We will robustly constrain the abundance of massive galaxies in the first billion years, their masses, structures and star formation histories, and AGN duty cycle. We will embed these results in the context of cosmological galaxy formation models. We can then determine how galaxy assembly took place in dark matter haloes, constrain the star formation efficiency, and answer how star formation was regulated in early galaxies. This proposal presents a breakthrough in our understanding of the first billion years, setting a new benchmark for galaxy formation models.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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80539 MUNCHEN
Germany
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