Hakim Atek, Ivo Labbé, Lukas J Furtak, Iryna Chemerynska, Seiji Fujimoto, David J Setton, Tim B Miller, Pascal Oesch, Rachel Bezanson, Sedona H Price, Pratika Dayal, Adi Zitrin, Vasily Kokorev, John R Weaver, Gabriel Brammer, Pieter van Dokkum, Christina C Williams, Sam E Cutler, Robert Feldmann, Yoshinobu Fudamoto, Jenny E Greene, Joel Leja, Michael V Maseda, Adam Muzzin, Richard Pan, Casey Papovich, Erica J Nelson, Themiya Nanayakkara, Daniel P Stark, Mauro Stefanon, Katherine A Suess, Bingjie Wang, Katherine E Whitaker
The identification of sources driving cosmic reionization, a major phase transition from neutral hydrogen to ionized plasma around 600-800 Myr after the Big Bang1-3 , has been a matter of debate4 . Some models suggest that high ionizing emissivity and escape fractions (fesc ) from quasars support their role in driving cosmic reionization5,6 . Others propose that the high fesc values from bright galaxies generate sufficient ionizing radiation to drive this process7 . Finally, a few studies suggest that the number density of faint galaxies, when combined with a stellar-mass-dependent model of ionizing efficiency and fesc , can effectively dominate cosmic reionization8,9 ...
February 2024: Nature