MUSE integral-field spectroscopy towards the Frontier Fields cluster Abell S1063: II. Properties of low luminosity Lyman alpha emitters at z>3

TL;DR

This study uses MUSE spectroscopy and gravitational lensing to analyze faint, low-mass galaxies at z>3, revealing their properties and potential role in cosmic reionization, with detailed insights into their stellar and gaseous characteristics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed report on the gaseous and stellar properties of extremely faint galaxies at high redshift, combining integral-field spectroscopy with lensing.

Findings

Low luminosity LAEs have very low Lya luminosities (~10^41.5 erg/s).

These galaxies have very low stellar masses (10^6-8 Msun) and young ages (1-100 Myr).

High specific star formation rates (~100 Gyr^-1) suggest starburst activity.

Abstract

In spite of their conjectured importance for the Epoch of Reionization, the properties of low-mass galaxies are currently still under large debate. In this article, we study the stellar and gaseous properties of faint, low-mass galaxies at z>3. We observed the Frontier Fields cluster Abell S1063 with MUSE over a 2 arcmin^2 field, and combined integral-field spectroscopy with gravitational lensing to perform a blind search for intrinsically faint Lya emitters (LAEs). We determined in total the redshift of 172 galaxies of which 14 are lensed LAEs at z=3-6.1. We increased the number of spectroscopically-confirmed multiple-image families from 6 to 17 and updated our gravitational-lensing model accordingly. The lensing-corrected Lya luminosities are with L(Lya) <= 10^41.5 erg/s among the lowest for spectroscopically confirmed LAEs at any redshift. We used expanding gaseous shell models to fit the Lya line profile, and find low column densities and expansion velocities. This is to our knowledge the first time that gaseous properties of such faint galaxies at z>=3 are reported. We performed SED modelling to broadband photometry from the U-band through the infrared to determine the stellar properties of these LAEs. The stellar masses are very low (10^{6-8} Msun), and are accompanied by very young ages of 1-100 Myr. The very high specific star formation rates (~100 Gyr^-1) are characteristic of starburst galaxies. The UV-continuum slopes beta are low in our sample, with beta<-2 for all galaxies with M_star<10^8 Msun. We conclude that our low-mass galaxies at 3<z<6 are forming stars at higher rates when correcting for stellar mass effects than seen locally or in more massive galaxies. The young stellar populations with high star-formation rates and low HI column densities lead to continuum slopes and LyC-escape fractions expected for a scenario where low mass galaxies reionise the Universe.