Simulating High-redshift Galaxies: Enhancing UV Luminosity with Star Formation Efficiency and a Top-heavy IMF

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to show that increasing star formation efficiency and adopting a top-heavy IMF can explain the high UV luminosity of early galaxies observed by JWST, highlighting the importance of these factors in galaxy formation models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that boosting star formation efficiency and using a top-heavy IMF are key to reproducing the brightness of high-redshift galaxies, providing new insights into early galaxy evolution.

Findings

Enhanced star formation efficiency leads to episodic starbursts and dust evacuation.

Adopting a top-heavy IMF increases UV luminosity and massive star formation.

Simulated observables match some JWST measurements, aiding future observations.

Abstract

Recent findings from photometric and spectroscopic JWST surveys have identified examples of high-redshift galaxies at $z \gtrsim 10$. These high-$z$ galaxies appear to form much earlier and exhibit greater UV luminosity than predicted by theoretical work. In this study, our goal is to reproduce the brightness of these sources by simulating high-redshift galaxies with virial masses $M_{\rm vir} = 10^{9} - 10^{10} M_{\odot}$ at $z > 10$. To achieve this, we conduct cosmological hydrodynamic zoom-in simulations, modifying baryonic sub-grid physics, and post-process our simulation results to confirm the observability of our simulated galaxies. Specifically, we enhanced star formation activity in high-redshift galaxies by either increasing the star formation efficiency up to 100\% or adopting a top-heavy initial mass function (IMF). Our simulation results indicate that both increasing star formation efficiency and adopting a top-heavy IMF play crucial roles in boosting the UV luminosity of high-redshift galaxies, potentially exceeding the limiting magnitude of JWST surveys in earlier epochs. Especially, the episodic starburst resulting from enhanced star formation efficiency may explain the high-redshift galaxies observed by JWST, as it evacuates dust from star-forming regions, making the galaxies more observable. We demonstrate this correlation between star formation activity and dust mass evolution within the simulated galaxies. Also, adopting a top-heavy IMF could enhance observability due to an overabundance of massive stars, although it may also facilitate rapid metal enrichment. Using our simulation results, we derive several observables such as effective radius, UV slope, and emission line rates, which could serve as valuable theoretical estimates for comparison with existing spectroscopic results and forthcoming data from the JWST NIRSpec and MIRI instruments.