UNCOVER/MegaScience Finds Uniform and Highly Bursty Star Formation at 3 < z < 9, consistent with the High-Redshift UV Luminosity Function

TL;DR

This study uses spectro-photometry to analyze star formation histories of high-redshift galaxies, revealing consistent burstiness from z~3 to 9, which explains the abundance of UV-bright galaxies without requiring evolution in star formation variability.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of star formation burstiness at high redshift using direct line measurements, challenging previous assumptions of evolution in star formation variability.

Findings

Scatter in line-to-UV ratio remains constant from z~3 to 7

Star formation burstiness can significantly boost UV brightness at high z

Models with long-duration, large-amplitude bursts match observations

Abstract

Star formation timescales are key to understanding fundamental physics like feedback mechanisms, as well as the abundance of bright galaxies at $z>10$. We investigate galaxy star formation histories (SFHs) and their evolution across $z\sim3$--9 by measuring the line-to-UV ratio (\rline) and line equivalent width (EW) of \hanii\ and \oiiihb\ directly from UNCOVER/MegaScience spectro-photometry without relying on a specific SFH or nebular line modeling. Our photometric measurements recover \rline\ and EW to $<10\%$ systematic accuracy compared to spectroscopy. This allows us to construct a large mass- (and flux-) complete sample and quantitatively examine how \rline\ evolves with redshift and stellar mass. We find that the intrinsic scatter in \rline\ does not significantly evolve with redshift across $3<z<7$, though it may increase at $z\gtrsim8$. We build population-level toy models using \texttt{fsps} to help interpret our observations, and find that scatter in \rline\ primarily reflects the amplitude of SFH fluctuations; this implies that our observed lack of evolution in the scatter of \rline\ is due to similar star formation burstiness from $z\sim3$ to $z\sim7$. Our observations are best reproduced by a set of SFHs with rising, long-duration, and large-amplitude bursts. Finally, we demonstrate that the toy model that best describes our $z\sim6$ data can boost UV brightness by up to $\Delta M_{\rm UV}\sim-2.0\,{\rm mag}$ compared with a 200\,Myr constant SFH, and naturally produces a large number of galaxies at $z>10$. This suggests that no significant evolution in star formation burstiness is required to explain the abundance of UV-bright galaxies at high redshift.