Spectroscopic confirmation of four metal-poor galaxies at z=10.3-13.2

Understand

Finding and characterising the first galaxies that illuminated the early Universe at cosmic dawn is pivotal to understand the physical conditions and the processes that led to the formation of the first stars.

• In the first few months of operations, imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been used to identify tens of candidates of galaxies at redshift (z) greater than 10, less than 450 million years after the Big Bang.
• However, none of these candidates has yet been confirmed spectroscopically, leaving open the possibility that they are actually low-redshift interlopers.
• Here we present spectroscopic confirmation and analysis of four galaxies unambiguously detected at redshift 10.3<z<13.2, previously selected from NIRCam imaging.