Early thin-disc assembly revealed by JWST edge-on galaxies

The vertical structure of stellar discs provides key constraints on their formation and evolution. Nearby spirals, including the Milky Way, host thin and thick components that may arise either from an early turbulent phase or from the subsequent dynamical heating of an initially thin disc; measuring disc thickness across cosmic time therefore offers a direct test of these scenarios. We present a new methodology to measure the thickness of edge-on galaxies that explicitly accounts for departures from perfectly edge-on orientations by fitting a full three-dimensional model with forward modelling. This improves on traditional approaches that assume an inclination of $90^\circ$ and can bias thicknesses high. Applying the method to JWST imaging of galaxies at $1