No Top-heavy Stellar Initial Mass Function Needed: The Ionizing Radiation of GS9422 Can Be Powered by a Mixture of an Active Galactic Nucleus and Stars
Abstract
JWST is producing high-quality rest-frame optical and UV spectra of faint galaxies at z > 4 for the first time, challenging models of galaxy and stellar populations. One galaxy recently observed at z = 5.943, GS9422, has nebular line and UV continuum emission that appears to require a high ionizing photon production efficiency. This has been explained with an exotic stellar initial mass function (IMF; Cameron et al. 2023a), 10–30x more top-heavy than a Salpeter IMF. Here we suggest an alternate explanation to this exotic IMF. We use a new flexible neural net emulator for CLOUDY, Cue, to infer the shape of the ionizing spectrum directly from the observed emission line fluxes. By describing the ionizing spectrum with a piecewise power law, Cue is agnostic to the source of the ionizing photons. Cue finds that the ionizing radiation from GS9422 can be approximated by a double power law characterized by , which can be interpreted as a combination of young, metal-poor stars and a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus with F ν ∝ λ 2 in a 65%/35% ratio. This suggests a significantly lower nebular continuum contribution to the observed UV flux (24%) than a top-heavy IMF (≳80%), and hence, necessitates a damped Lyα absorber to explain the continuum turnover bluewards of ∼1400 Å. While current data cannot rule out either scenario, given the immense impact the proposed top-heavy IMF would have on models of galaxy formation, it is important to propose viable alternative explanations and to further investigate the nature of peculiar high-z nebular emitters.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- July 2024
- DOI:
- 10.3847/2041-8213/ad5280
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2404.02333
- Bibcode:
- 2024ApJ...969L...5L
- Keywords:
-
- Photoionization;
- AGN host galaxies;
- Interstellar medium;
- High-redshift galaxies;
- 2060;
- 2017;
- 847;
- 734;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJL