The onset of star formation 250 million years after the Big Bang

In this IAU symposium, we present results of our recent paper, Hashimoto et al. (2018a) focusing on its spectral energy distribution modeling. We present spectroscopic observations of MACS1149-JD1, a gravitationally lensed galaxy originally discovered by Zheng et al. (2012) via the dropout technique. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), we detect an emission line of doubly ionized oxygen, [O III] 88 μm, at a redshift of 9.1096±0.0006. This precisely determined redshift indicates that the red rest-frame optical colour observed with the Spitzer Space Telescope arises from a dominant stellar component that formed about 250 million years after the Big Bang, corresponding to a redshift of about 15. MACS1149-JD1 clearly demonstrates the importance and power of spectral energy distribution modeling to understand the earliest star formation history of the Universe.