Papers › Inferring the Ionizing Photon Contributions of High-Redshift Galaxies to Reionization...
Inferring the Ionizing Photon Contributions of High-Redshift Galaxies to Reionization with JWST NIRCam Photometry
Nicholas Choustikov, Richard Stiskalek, Aayush Saxena, Harley Katz, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz
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JWST is providing constraints on the history of reionization owing to its ability to detect faint galaxies at z≫6. Modeling this history requires understanding both the ionizing photon production rate (ξᵢₒₙ) and the fraction of those photons that escape into the intergalactic medium (f_(esc)). Observational estimates of these quantities generally rely on spectroscopy for which large samples with well-defined selection functions are limited. To overcome this challenge, we present and release an implicit likelihood inference pipeline, PHOTONIOn, trained on mock photometry to predict the escaped ionizing luminosity of individual galaxies (Ṅᵢₒₙ) based on photometric magnitudes and redshifts. We show that PHOTONIOn is able to reliably infer Ṅᵢₒₙ from photometry. This is in contrast to traditional SED-fitting approaches which rely on f_(esc) prescriptions that often over-predict Ṅᵢₒₙ for LyC-dim galaxies, even when given access to spectroscopic data. We have deployed PHOTONIOn on a sample of 4,559 high-redshift galaxies from the JADES Deep survey, finding gentle redshift evolutions of log₁₀(Ṅᵢₒₙ) = (0.08±0.01)z + (51.60±0.06) and log₁₀(f_(esc)ξᵢₒₙ) = (0.07±0.01)z + (24.12±0.07). Late-time values for the ionizing photon production rate density are consistent with theoretical models and observations. We measure the evolution of the IGM ionized fraction to find that observed populations of star-forming galaxies are capable of driving reionization in GOODS-S to completion by z∼5.3 without the need for AGN or other exotic sources, consistent with other studies of the same field. The 20% of UV-brightest galaxies (M_(UV)<-18.5) reionize 35% of the survey volume, demonstrating that UV faint LyC emitters are crucial for reionization.
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