A new study led by Prof. Keller comparing recent JWST observations to simulation models of galaxy formation has been accepted in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

With the launch of the JWST, a number of exciting new detections of galaxies in the extremely early universe have been reported. Unfortunately, many of these have relied on relatively uncertain estimates of their distances. In December 2022, the JADES team reported the first galaxies above redshift 10 with high-accuracy spectroscopy.

Prof. Keller, and his collaborators Prof. Ferah Munshi, Dr. Maxime Trebitsch, and Prof. Michael Tremmel compared these new observations with a number of existing simulations of galaxy formation to determine whether these JWST observations break modern theories for galaxy formation. In brief, they found it does not! Our understanding of galaxy formation seems to work well even for galaxies formed in the first 500 million years of the Universe’s history!