The Growth of Galaxies in the Early Universe

I have recently been working with the UNCOVER and MegaScience surveys to study the morphology of galaxies in the first Billion years of the Universe. Both these surveys target the lensing cluster Abell 2744, which is one of the best studied fields with JWST. These two surveys provide deep images in all 20 NIRCAM filters on JWST providing excellent sensitivity and spectral coverage.

In a recent paper we show that low mass galaxies grow extremely quickly in the early Universe, much quicker then expected based our previous expectations. This suggests a different growth mechanism that is allowing these galaxies to expand very rapidly. This is just the beginning, in future studies I hope to combine morphological measurements with detailed physical characterization for spectra to better understand the underlying mechanisms fo galaxy growth.