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Strong spectral features from asymptotic giant branch stars in distant quiescent galaxies

Nature Astronomy volume 9, pages 128–140 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Dating the ages and weighting the stellar populations in galaxies are essential steps when studying galaxy formation through cosmic times. Evolutionary population synthesis models with different input physics are used for this purpose. Moreover, the contribution from the thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stellar phase, which peaks for intermediate-age 0.6–2 Gyr systems, has been debated for decades. Here we report the detection of strong cool-star signatures in the rest-frame near-infrared spectra of three young (~1 Gyr), massive (~1010 M⊙) quiescent galaxies at large look-back time, z = 1–2, using JWST/NIRSpec. The coexistence of oxygen- and carbon-type absorption features, spectral edges and features from rare species, such as vanadium and possibly zirconium, reveal a strong contribution from TP-AGB stars. Population synthesis models with a significant TP-AGB contribution reproduce the observations better than those with a weak TP-AGB, which are commonly used. These findings call for revisions of published stellar population fitting results, as they point to populations with lower masses and younger ages and have further implications for cosmic dust production and chemical enrichment. New generations of improved models are needed, informed by these and future observations.

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Fig. 1: NIR rest-frame spectrum of the quiescent galaxy D36123 at z = 1.082.
Fig. 2: Identified features and best-fitting models for D36123.
Fig. 3: Specific features and comparison with models and stellar templates.
Fig. 4: NIR spectra and identified features for the other two galaxies.

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Data availability

The JWST NIRSpec data are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope (http://archive.stsci.edu), under programme IDs 1345 and 2750. The CEERS JWST imaging data are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope under programme ID 1345. Reduced NIRCam data products from the CEERS team are available at https://ceers.github.io. The HST imaging data are available from the CANDELS survey at https://archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/candels, and the NIRCam/Ks imaging data are published in the 3D-HST survey at https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/3d-hst/.

Code availability

The JWST NIRSpec data were reduced using the JWST pipeline (v.1.8.5, reference mappings 1041 and 1029; https://github.com.spacetelescope/jwst). The MSAFIT software is available at https://github.com/annadeg/jwst-msafit. The galfit software is published at https://users.obs.carnegiescience.edu/peng/work/galfit/galfit.html.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Origlia and B. Holwerda for discussions. M.D., P.A.H., S.L.F., J.S.K. and C.P. acknowledge support from NASA through the Early Release Science Program of the Space Telescope Science Institute (Award JWST-ERS-1345) and the JWST-GO-2750 award. C.G.G. acknowledges support from the French National Centre for Space Studies. C.D.E. acknowledges funding from the State Research Agency of the Ministry for Science and Innovation (Spain) and the NextGenerationEU/PRTR (Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan, European Union) through the Juan de la Cierva-Formación programme (Grant No. FJC2021-047307-I). S.L. acknowledges support from the China Scholarship Council. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12192222, 12192220 and 12121003). This work is based on observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-03127.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Shiying Lu & Qiusheng Gu

  2. Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM, Paris, France

    Shiying Lu, Emanuele Daddi, David Elbaz, Carlos Gómez-Guijarro, Yipeng Lyu & Benjamin Magnelli

  3. Key Laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics (Nanjing University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing, China

    Shiying Lu & Qiusheng Gu

  4. Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

    Claudia Maraston

  5. NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Mark Dickinson & Pablo Arrabal Haro

  6. Instituto de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile

    Raphael Gobat

  7. INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Padua, Italy

    Alvio Renzini

  8. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Mauro Giavalisco & Yingjie Cheng

  9. Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Micaela B. Bagley & Steven L. Finkelstein

  10. INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Monte Porzio Catone, Italy

    Antonello Calabrò

  11. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    Alexander de la Vega & Bahram Mobasher

  12. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), La Laguna, Spain

    Chiara D’Eugenio & Marc Huertas-Company

  13. Universidad de la Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

    Chiara D’Eugenio & Marc Huertas-Company

  14. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Nimish P. Hathi, Anton M. Koekemoer & L. Y. Aaron Yung

  15. Université Paris-Cité, LERMA - Observatoire de Paris, PSL, Paris, France

    Marc Huertas-Company

  16. Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe

  17. Department of Physics, University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA

    Aurélien Henry

  18. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Casey Papovich

  19. George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Casey Papovich

  20. ESA/AURA Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Nor Pirzkal

  21. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    R. Michael Rich

  22. Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Sandro Tacchella

  23. Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Sandro Tacchella

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  1. Shiying Lu
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  2. Emanuele Daddi
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Contributions

S.L. and E.D. conceived this project, and selected and identified galaxies. S.L. led the analysis, and together with E.D., C.M. and M.D., wrote the manuscript. P.A.H. and M.D. led the original observations and reduced the NIRSpec spectra. R.G. wrote the fitting code and with C.D.E. helped with the spectral fitting procedures. All authors aided in the analysis and interpretation and contributed to the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shiying Lu, Emanuele Daddi or Claudia Maraston.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Astronomy thanks Rogério Riffel, Ambra Nanni and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Example of galfit results.

The original image, best-fit model, and residual of object D36123 in NIRCam/F150W are shown in the top row. The results of objects 8595 in WFC3/F160W and 9025 in NIRCam/F150W are presented in the middle and bottom rows, respectively. The three targets are marked by white crosses on the original images (notice that 8595 is not at the center of the cutout). The cutouts of objects D36123 and 9025 are 3” × 3” wide, with a scale of 0.03”/pix. The cutouts for object 8595 are 5” × 5” wide with a pixel scale of 0.06”/pix. The best-fit structural parameters of each object are shown at the bottom of each residual panel, including the effective radius (re) in arcsec, Sérsic index (n), axis ratio (b/a), position angle (PA) in degree, and AB Magnitude.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Best-fit results and relative deviations.

From left to right, the best fits (top) and relative deviations (bottom) obtained by fitting BC03, C09, M13, and M05 models are shown. The panels from top to bottom present the results corresponding to D36123 in the full fit (1st) and in masking 0.5-1μm fit (2nd), 8595 (3rd) and 9025 (4th) in the full fit, respectively. The red horizontal dashed lines are the SNR-weighted mean of the relative deviation in the fitted region, and the corresponding value within the fitted (masked) region is printed in red (blue) on the top of each bottom panel. Detector defects in the spectrum of object 9025 are masked by grey rectangles.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Best-fitting spectra and relative deviations for D36123 based on XSL, E-MILES, and CB07 models.

Analogous to Extended Data Fig. 2. The grey-shaded areas in the XSL model show the uncovered region at a short wavelength and two noisy telluric regions at a longer wavelength.

Extended Data Table 1 Selected indexes and features quantitatively measured
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Stellar population properties of D36123 modeled based on XSL, E-MILES and CB07
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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–3 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Lu, S., Daddi, E., Maraston, C. et al. Strong spectral features from asymptotic giant branch stars in distant quiescent galaxies. Nat Astron 9, 128–140 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02391-9

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