Time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published yesterday (27th September 2023).
The latest paper is the 37th so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 102nd in all. The authors are Joe McCaffrey (Maynooth, Ireland), Samantha Hardin (Georgia Tech, USA), John Wise (Georgia Tech) and John Regan (Maynooth). As this one involved two authors from my own Department, I recused myself from the editorial process, although it is work I am very interested in.
The primary classification for this paper is Astrophysics of Galaxies and its title is “No Tension: JWST Galaxies at z>10 Consistent with Cosmological Simulations”. I’ve blogged about this paper before, a few months ago, when it appeared on the arXiv. The editorial process on this one has been very thorough and it has been a few rounds with the reviewers before being accepted for publication. The authors may have found this a bit irksome, but I think the process improved them paper considerably, which is what it is meant to do.
As many of you will be aware, there’s been a considerable to-do not to mention a hoo-hah about the detections by JWST of some galaxies at high redshift. Some of these have been shown not to be galaxies at high redshift after all, but some around z=10 seem to be genuine. This paper is a response to claims that these somehow rule out the standard cosmological framework.
The key figure in the current paper is this:
The solid curves show the number of galaxies of a given mass one would expect to see as a function of redshift in fields comparable to those observed with estimated values from observations (star-shaped symbols). As you can see the observed points are consistent with the predictions. There’s no tension, so you can all relax.
Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay of the published version which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.