A Strongly Lensed Dusty Starburst of an Intrinsic Disk Morphology at Photometric Redshift of 7.7

We present COSBO-7, a strong millimeter (mm) source known for more than sixteen years but was just revealed its near-to-mid-IR counterpart by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The precise pin-pointing by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) on the exquisite NIRCam and MIRI images show that it is a background source gravitationally lensed by a single foreground galaxy, and the analysis of its spectral energy distribution by different tools consistently derives its photometric redshift at ∼7.7. Strikingly, our lens modeling based on the JWST data shows that it has a regular, disk morphology in the source plane. The dusty region giving rise to the far-IR-to-mm emission seems to be confined to a limited region to one side of the disk and has a high dust temperature of >90 K. The galaxy is experiencing starburst both within and outside of this dusty region. After taking the lensing magnification of μ≈ 2.53.6 into account, the intrinsic star formation rate is several hundred M_⊙ yr^-1 both within the dusty region and across the more extended stellar disk, and the latter already has >10^10M_⊙ of stars in place. If all this is true, COSBO-7 presents an extraordinary case that is against the common wisdom about galaxy formation in the early universe; simply put, its existence poses a critical question to be answered: how could a massive disk galaxy come into being so early in the universe and sustain its regular morphology in the middle of an enormous starburst?