A phenomenological model for bright galaxies in the high-redshift Universe

Recent observations by the James Webb Telescope (JWST) have unveiled numerous galaxy candidates between $z \sim 9 - 16.5$, hinting at an over-abundance of the bright-end of the UV Luminosity Function (UV LF) $z \gtrsim 11$. Possible solutions require extremely bursty star formation, these systems being dust-free, an evolving initial mass function or even cosmic variance. In this work, we develop an analytic formalism to study dust enrichment and its impact on the UV luminosity of both main-sequence early galaxies and extremely bursty star formers. Our dust model, including the key processes of dust production in type II Supernovae, dust destruction, ejection, growth and sputtering, is calibrated against the latest datasets from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) at $z \sim 4-7$. The model has only 3 free parameters: (i) the star formation efficiency; (ii) the dust growth timescale; and (iii) the dust distribution radius. Our key results are: (i) explaining the observed UV LF requires an average star formation efficiency that increases with redshift as $f_*(z) = 10^{0.13z-3.5}$ at $z \sim 5-13$ with a number of observations hinting at objects lying a factor 10 above this main-sequence. (ii) The dust enrichment of early systems is driven by dust production in SNII ejecta; growth and sputtering are the second and third most crucial processes, impacting the dust mass by 60% and 40% respectively at $z \sim 7$. (iii) In our model, galaxies at $z \gtrsim 9$ can still host significant amounts of dust reaching average dust-to-stellar mass ratios of 0.19% (0.14%) at $z \sim 9$ ($z \sim 11$). Dust attenuation decreases with redshift due to dust being increasingly more dispersed within the halo. (iv) the galaxies observed by ALMA at $z \sim 7$ comprise a biased sample that is not representative of the average population that makes up the UV LF.