Speaker
Description
The JWST has discovered an abundance of z>10 luminous galaxies that were not predicted by galaxy formation models. One common explanation for such striking observation invokes an increased star formation burstiness to reconcile modeling and observations. Such increased burstiness, however, is reflected in the pattern of pre-SN and SN feedback. I will show how such feedback has dramatic consequences for the dust content of galaxies in the first billion years of the Universe through a new suite of high-resolution radiation-hydrodynamical simulations, ThesanZoom. These simulations build on the state-of-the-art Thesan cosmological simulation and are unique since (I) they achieve pc-scale resolution in the ISM while consistently modeling the radiation field on scales up to ~100 Mpc; and (ii) model the coupling between the self-consistent cosmic dust model and radiation, which enables them to predict the dust temperature on the fly.
I will discuss how the bursty star formation of these simulations efficiently destroys their dust content, creating tensions with observations of dust-rich high-redshift galaxies. Interestingly, many of the common scaling relations used to test dust models appear unaffected, hiding the feedback impact from common diagnostics. These results question the viability of bursty star formation as an explanation for the abundance of luminous objects in the first few hundred million years observed by JWST.
