An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at z > 3 in Public JWST Fields
Journal
Date Issued
2023
Author(s)
Valentino, Francesco
•
Brammer, Gabriel
•
Gould, Katriona M.L.
•
Kokorev, Vasily
•
Fujimoto, Seiji
•
Jespersen, Christian Kragh
•
Vijayan, Aswin P.
•
Weaver, John R.
•
Ito, Kei
•
Tanaka, Masayuki
•
Ilbert, Olivier
•
Magdis, Georgios E.
•
Whitaker, Katherine E.
•
Faisst, Andreas L.
•
•
Gillman, Steven
•
Giménez-Arteaga, Clara
•
Gómez-Guijarro, Carlos
•
Kubo, Mariko
•
Heintz, Kasper E.
•
•
Oesch, Pascal
•
Onodera, Masato
•
Rizzo, Francesca
•
Lee, Minju
•
Strait, Victoria
•
Toft, Sune
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 1/4145 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 1/480 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.
Volume
947
Issue
1
Start page
20
Issn Identifier
0004-637X
Ads BibCode
2023ApJ...947...20V
Rights
open.access
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