JADES releases uniformly modeled catalog of about 500,000 galaxies in GOODS deep fields

Astronomers now have a major new reference dataset from the James Webb Space Telescope: the JADES team has publicly released a uniformly modeled catalog of inferred galaxy properties for about 500,000 sources in the GOODS-N and GOODS-S deep fields. The catalog, part of JADES Data Release 5, was described in a preprint posted to arXiv on May 20 by Qiao Duan and 39 co-authors.

The release matters because it goes beyond making images and brightness measurements public. It gives researchers a shared set of model-derived physical properties — along with posterior distributions that capture uncertainty — for a huge sample of galaxies observed in the same way. That should make it easier to compare studies of how galaxies built up their stars, gained mass and shut down star formation over cosmic time.

In the paper, the authors wrote: “We present the galaxy stellar population catalogue from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) Data Release 5 (DR5), providing homogeneous Bayesian inference of physical galaxy properties in GOODS-N and GOODS-S.” The catalog includes estimates for stellar mass, star-formation rate, star-formation history, dust attenuation, metallicity and the contribution from active galactic nuclei, or AGN — the bright regions powered by matter falling onto supermassive black holes. The abstract says the release provides improved constraints on recent star-formation activity for about 350,000 galaxies at redshifts of 1 to 9, spanning a large stretch of cosmic history.

To build the catalog, the team modeled the spectral energy distributions — the amount of light galaxies emit across different wavelengths — using Prospector, a Bayesian inference framework widely used in galaxy studies. The fits combine deep JWST imaging from NIRCam and MIRI with ancillary multi-wavelength data. The modeling includes flexible, non-parametric star-formation histories, nebular emission from gas, dust attenuation, metallicities, and mid-infrared emission from dust and AGN. A key choice was to use an evolving star-forming main sequence prior, meant to reflect how star-forming galaxies are expected to behave over time. As the abstract put it, “The adoption of a physically motivated prior mitigates unphysical solutions and reduces degeneracies between redshift, age, dust, and metallicity, particularly for faint sources.”

The stellar population catalog sits within the broader JADES DR5 release for the GOODS fields, a pair of well-studied legacy sky areas used to probe the distant universe. Companion DR5 papers posted Jan. 22 described a dataset built from roughly 1,250 hours of JWST imaging, covering about 469 square arcminutes and providing photometry in up to 35 space-based bands for roughly 500,000 sources. JADES, the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, is one of the telescope’s flagship programs for studying distant galaxies.

The team said the full catalog and posterior summaries are publicly available as part of JADES DR5 through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, where the JADES high-level science products are listed under DOI 10.17909/8tdj-8n28. One important caveat remains: These values are inferred from models, not measured directly, and they depend on the assumptions built into the fitting, especially for faint sources. The authors said they validated the catalog with internal consistency checks and comparisons to spectroscopic redshifts where those benchmark measurements were available.