An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at z > 3 in Public JWST Fields
Abstract
We present the results of a systematic search for candidate quiescent galaxies in the distant universe in 11 JWST fields with publicly available observations collected during the first 3 months of operations and covering an effective sky area of ~145 arcmin2. We homogeneously reduce the new JWST data and combine them with existing observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. We select a robust sample of ~80 candidate quiescent and quenching galaxies at 3 < z < 5 using two methods: (1) based on their rest-frame UVJ colors, and (2) a novel quantitative approach based on Gaussian mixture modeling of the near-UV - U, U - V, and V - J rest-frame color space, which is more sensitive to recently quenched objects. We measure comoving number densities of massive (M ⋆ ≥ 1010.6 M ⊙) quiescent galaxies consistent with previous estimates relying on ground-based observations, after homogenizing the results in the literature with our mass and redshift intervals. However, we find significant field-to-field variations of the number densities up to a factor of 2-3, highlighting the effect of cosmic variance and suggesting the presence of overdensities of red quiescent galaxies at z > 3, as could be expected for highly clustered massive systems. Importantly, JWST enables the robust identification of quenching/quiescent galaxy candidates at lower masses and higher redshifts than before, challenging standard formation scenarios. All data products, including the literature compilation, are made publicly available.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- April 2023
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/acbefa
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2302.10936
- Bibcode:
- 2023ApJ...947...20V
- Keywords:
-
- Galaxy evolution;
- High-redshift galaxies;
- Galaxy quenching;
- Quenched galaxies;
- Post-starburst galaxies;
- Surveys;
- 594;
- 734;
- 2040;
- 2016;
- 2176;
- 1671;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
- E-Print:
- 15 pages, 6 Figures + Appendix. Accepted for publication in ApJ on Feb, 9. Data release: - Reduced HST+JWST mosaics + photometric catalogs and Eazy-py modeling: https://erda.ku.dk/archives/7166d013c1ca1371aac3c57b9e73190d/published-archive.html - Supplementary material and tables: https://zenodo.org/record/7614908#.Y-4ZruzMLmE - MAST: https://doi.org/10.17909/g3nt-a370 - See also Gould et al. 2023