Oral Presentation

First JWST results of local luminous infrared galaxies from GOALS

Author(s): Hanae Inami (Hiroshima University)

Presenter: Hanae Inami (Hiroshima University)

Mergers play an important role in driving galaxy evolution. In the local universe, luminous infrared galaxies, LIRGs, cover a wide range of merger stages, which lets us study merger-induced events in detail. The extreme energy of LIRGs is contributed by active galactic nuclei (AGN) and/or starbursts due to mergers. Although earlier infrared space telescopes revealed the importance of LIRGs, their limited spatial resolution and sensitivity prevented us from pinpointing the energy sources, resolving gas kinematics, and detecting faint coronal emission lines. JWST has overcome these issues and started to transform our understanding of local LIRGs. The JWST Early Release Program 1328 has targeted four merging LIRGs in the local Universe, NGC 7469, VV 114, II Zw 096, and NGC 3256, selected from the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey (GOALS) project. In this talk, I will present an overview of this program and some first results from JWST. High sensitivity and spatial resolution imaging has revealed dust-embedded sources for the first time, including young and massive star-forming clusters and regions. Integral field spectroscopy has enabled studies of gas properties and dust properties in both spatial and spectral regimes to investigate interactions of AGN and starburst activities.