Near-IR clumps and their properties in high-z galaxies with JWST/NIRCam

Resolved stellar morphology of z>1 galaxies was inaccessible before JWST. This limitation, due to the impact of dust on rest-frame UV light, had withheld major observational conclusions required to understand the importance of clumps in galaxy evolution. Essentially independent of this issue, we use the rest-frame near-IR for a stellar-mass dependent clump detection method and determine reliable estimations of selection effects. We exploit publicly available JWST/NIRCam and HST/ACS imaging data from CEERS, to create a stellar-mass based picture of clumps in a mass-complete sample of 418 galaxies within a wide wavelength coverage of 0.5-4.6${\mu}$m and a redshift window of 1<z<2. We find that a near-IR detection gives access to a larger set of clumps within galaxies, with those also detected in UV making up only 28%. Whereas, 85% of the UV clumps are found to have a near-IR counterpart. These near-IR clumps closely follow the UVJ classification of their respective host galaxies, with these hosts mainly populating the star-forming regime besides a fraction of them (16%) that can be considered quiescent. The mass of the detected clumps are found to be within the range of $10^{7.5-9.5}\,\rm M_{\odot}$, therefore expected to drive gas into galaxy cores through tidal torques. However, there is likely contribution from blending of smaller unresolved structures. Furthermore, we observe a radial gradient of increasing clump mass towards the centre of galaxies. This trend could be an indication of clump migration, but accurate star-formation measurements would be required to confirm such a scenario.