COSMOS-Webb: The Webb Cosmic Origins Survey
Abstract
We propose the COSMOS-Webb Survey, an ambitious treasury program to map a contiguous 0.6 deg^2 area with deep NIRCam imaging in 4 filters and a 0.2 deg^2 deep MIRI survey in parallel. COSMOS-Webb will accomplish the following science goals that simply cannot be done with any other existing or currently planned survey:
I) revolutionize our understanding of reionization's spatial distribution, environments, and drivers at early stages by pioneering the detection of thousands of galaxies in the epoch of reionization (EoR, z=6-11), II) identify hundreds of the rarest quiescent galaxies in the first 2 Gyr (z > 4) to place stringent constraints on the formation of the Universe's most massive (M*>10^10Msun) galaxies, and III) directly measure the evolution of the stellar mass to halo mass relation (SMHR) out to z~2.5 and its variance with galaxies' star formation histories and morphologies. COSMOS-Webb is designed to leave no stone unturned for deep, wide extragalactic surveys - eliminating cosmic variance and resulting in an order of magnitude more early Universe galaxies than all other Hubble+Webb surveys combined, thus significantly constraining the shape of the bright end of the UV luminosity function and mapping the early cosmic web. It will be the primary legacy dataset from Webb for the extragalactic community by providing quick public releases of multi-band, high-resolution near-IR imaging of half a million galaxies (and an unprecedented 32,000 in the mid-IR) thus enabling innumerable legacy science projects. Conducting this next level ambitious survey now is crucial given the finite lifetime of Webb and the need to plan swift follow-up of its unique discoveries.- Publication:
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JWST Proposal. Cycle 1
- Pub Date:
- March 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021jwst.prop.1727K