Can Cosmological Simulations Reproduce the Spectroscopically Confirmed Galaxies Seen at $z\geq 10$?

TL;DR

Recent spectroscopic observations of galaxies at redshifts above 10 from JWST are generally consistent with existing cosmological galaxy formation models, challenging previous assumptions of tension.

Contribution

This study compares cosmological simulation predictions with spectroscopically confirmed high-redshift galaxies to assess model validity.

Findings

Simulations reproduce observed galaxy properties at z>10

No significant tension with ΛCDM or current models

Supports the reliability of existing galaxy formation models at high redshift

Abstract

Recent photometric detections of extreme $(z>10)$ redshift galaxies from the JWST have been shown to be in strong tension with existing simulation models for galaxy formation, and in the most acute case, in tension with $\Lambda CDM$ itself. These results, however, all rest on the confirmation of these distances by spectroscopy. Recently, the JADES survey has detected the most distant galaxies with spectroscopically confirmed redshifts, with four galaxies found with redshifts between $z=10.38$ and $z=13.2$. In this paper, we compare simulation predictions from four large cosmological volumes and two zoom-in protoclusters with the JADES observations to determine whether these spectroscopically confirmed galaxy detections are in tension with existing models for galaxy formation, or with $\Lambda CDM$ more broadly. We find that existing models for cosmological galaxy formation can generally reproduce the observations for JADES, in terms of galaxy stellar masses, star formation rates, and the number density of galaxies at $z>10$.