Journal article
The most luminous z ∼ 9-10 galaxy candidates yet found: The luminosity function, cosmic star-formation rate, and the first mass density estimate at 500 Myr
PA Oesch, RJ Bouwens, GD Illingworth, I Labbé, R Smit, M Franx, PG Van Dokkum, I Momcheva, MLN Ashby, GG Fazio, JS Huang, SP Willner, V Gonzalez, D Magee, M Trenti, GB Brammer, RE Skelton, LR Spitler
Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2014
Abstract
We present the discovery of four surprisingly bright (H160 ∼ 26-27 mag AB) galaxy candidates at z ∼ 9-10 in the complete HST CANDELS WFC3/IR GOODS-N imaging data, doubling the number of z ∼ 10 galaxy candidates that are known, just ∼500 Myr after the big bang. Two similarly bright sources are also detected in a reanalysis of the GOODS-S data set. Three of the four galaxies in GOODS-N are significantly detected at 4.5σ-6.2σ in the very deep Spitzer/IRAC 4.5 μm data, as is one of the GOODS-S candidates. Furthermore, the brightest of our candidates (at z = 10.2 ± 0.4) is robustly detected also at 3.6 μm (6.9σ), revealing a flat UV spectral energy distribution with a slope β = -2.0 ± 0.2, consis..
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Awarded by European Commission
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referee for very helpful feedback that improved the paper. We also thank Jason Jaacks, Sandro Tacchella, and Kristian Finlator for providing us with the predictions of their models. Support for this work was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HF-51278.01 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. Additionally, this work was supported by NASA grant NAG5-7697, NASA grant HSTGO-11563, NASA grant HST-GO-12177, NASA grant JPL1416188/1438944, ERC grant HIGHZ 227749, and NWO vrij competitie grant 600.065.140.11N211. This work was further supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant PHY-1066293 and the Aspen Center for Physics. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). This research used the facilities of the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre operated by the National Research Council of Canada with the support of the Canadian Space Agency.