The frisky infancy of galaxy growth unlocked with JWST

by Prof. Karina Caputi (Univ. of Groningen (NL))

Thursday 16 Apr 2026, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Rome

Sala Jappelli (Osservatorio astronomico di Padova)

Low-mass galaxies (with stellar masses < 10^9 Msun) are fundamental to understand the first steps of galaxy growth. For many years, the study of dwarf galaxies in the local Universe has given us a glimpse of the conditions that would likely have applied to their analogues at early cosmic times. Now, thanks to the superb sensitivity of JWST, we can directly study the detailed properties of significant samples of low-mass sources up to the Epoch of Reionisation and beyond. In the first part of this talk I will review some of the crucial aspects that we have learned about star-formation activity in low-mass galaxies in the first few billion years of cosmic time. I will particularly discuss the importance of burstiness and presence of ionised gas outflows in these systems. In the second part of the talk, I will present our study of the Pseudo-LRD-NOM, a highly magnified low-mass galaxies at z~6 with very special spectroscopic properties: a very high Balmer decrement and a complete lack of metal lines. I will argue that the simple spectrum of this source provides evidence for complex physical conditions which are similar to those of Little Red Dots (LRDs), suggesting that the Pseudo-LRD-NOM could be a precursor to one of them.

 

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https://unipd.zoom.us/j/82482883288?pwd=MVvmMWSGaiVrGMyAFOdyQG61OAcI7D.1

Meeting ID: 824 8288 3288 
Passcode: 072472