An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at z > 3 in Public JWST Fields

April 2023 • 2023ApJ...947...20V

Authors • 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. • Gallazzi, Anna • Gillman, Steven • Giménez-Arteaga, Clara • Gómez-Guijarro, Carlos • Kubo, Mariko • Heintz, Kasper E. • Hirschmann, Michaela • 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 ~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 _⋆ ≥ 10^10.6 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.

Links

• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10936
• NED https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/uri/NED::InRefcode/2023ApJ...947...20V
• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.3847%2F1538-4357%2Facbefa
• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2023ApJ...947...20V
• PDF https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acbefa/pdf
• DATA https://archive.stsci.edu/mastbibref.php?bibcode=2023ApJ...947...20V
• DATA https://doi.org/10.17909/g3nt-a370
• DATA https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7614908
• DATA https://hst.esac.esa.int/ehst/#/pages/search;bibcode=2023ApJ...947...20V