Rutgers University Astrophysics Seminar

In the contemporary Universe, most galaxies are supported by ordered rotation, yet a majority of the most massive and quiescent systems are dominated by random stellar motions and classified as slow-rotators. Slow rotators are expected to be rare at early cosmic times, and observational studies of massive galaxies at high redshift have so far revealed only rapidly rotating systems. I will present JWST/NIRSpec/IFU observations of three ultramassive galaxies at z 3.5, which display a variety of kinematic signatures and demonstrate that the formation of slow-rotating massive galaxies was already underway when the Universe was less than 2 Gyr old.