sci24004 — Announcement

JADES Data Release 3

29 May 2024

- Francesco D’Eugenio (Cambridge), on behalf of the JADES Consortium - 

The JWST Advanced Early Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a collaboration between the Guaranteed Time Observation teams of the NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments. The goal of JADES is to reveal the physical properties of galaxies in the young Universe, from when it was less than two billion years old up to the formation of the first galaxies right after the Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’.

JADES makes optimal use of the synergies between NIRCam and NIRSpec to present a complete view of galaxies, combining their morphologies and total fluxes from the imaging, with detailed physical properties that can be measured from rest-frame UV, optical and near-IR spectra. The NIRSpec part of the programme uses the micro-shutter assembly (MSA), which enables observations of more than one hundred targets simultaneously. 

JADES has observed two tiers in depth: a deep tier, aimed at the faintest and most distant objects, and a medium tier, aimed at brighter galaxies. The first data release of JADES provided data from one of the regions in the deep tier, including 250 unique spectra. The second release provided imaging of the JADES Origin Field that lies within the GOODS-South region.

We are happy to announce the third data release (DR3), which provides new, multi-band images in the GOODS-North field, which includes the iconic Hubble Deep Field region. It also includes more than 4000 unique NIRSpec/MSA spectra in both the GOODS-North and GOODS-South fields, together with 2000 measured redshifts. Most of the spectra span the full wavelength range of NIRSpec from 0.7 to 5 microns, and use two spectral resolutions: observations at R~100 with the double-pass prism for high sensitivity and continuum science, and observations with the medium-resolution gratings (R~1000) to study the detailed properties of emission lines.

The DR3 products are now available to the community here as Higher-Level Science Products from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI. The release includes the longest on-source NIRSpec observations to date, reaching 70 hours for the highest-priority targets! The spectra of galaxies such as GN-z11, GS-z11-0 and GS-z12-0 reveal the surprising physical properties of galaxies in the earliest phases of the Universe, back to just 350 million years after the Big Bang. The products also include image previews of the NIRSpec spectra, with the example of GN-z11 shown in Image B.

The NIRSpec instrument was provided by ESA, and was built by a consortium of European companies led by Airbus Defence and Space, with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre providing its detector and micro-shutter subsystems. NIRCam was provided by the University of Arizona.

Contacts

Chris Evans
ESA/HST & ESA/JWST Project Scientist
ESA Office, STScI Baltimore, USA
Email: hubblenewseurope@stsci.edu