JADES Provides Spectroscopic Confirmation of Earliest Galaxies Yet

Data from JADES in and around the Hubble Ultra Deep Field has provided the JWST spectroscopic confirmation of the earliest galaxies confirmed thus far in the mission. JADES used its very deep multi-color infrared images to identify high-redshift galaxy candidates through their distinctive colors, as reported in Robertson et al. (2023). We then used a very long spectroscopic exposure, 28 hours!, to target four of these candidates, confirming them to be at redshifts as high as 13.2. The spectroscopic discovery and analysis of the implications of the spectra are described in Curtis-Lake et al. (2023).

This work is described further in a NASA blog post and has since been published in Nature Astronomy.