Computer Science
Scientific paper
Jul 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007hst..prop11192y&link_type=abstract
HST Proposal ID #11192. Cycle 16
Computer Science
Scientific paper
While the deepest pencil-beam near-IR survey suggested that the Universe was too young to build up many luminous galaxies by z ~ 7--8 Bouwens & Illingworth 2006, there is also evidenc indicating the contrary. It is now known that some galaxies with stellar masses of M>1e10 Msun were already in place by z ~ 6--7, which strongly suggests that their progenitors should be significantly more luminous, and hence detectable in deep, wide-field near-IR surveys Yan et al. 2006. As galaxies at such a high redshift should manifest themselves as "dropouts" from the optical, we have carried out a very wide-field, deep near-IR survey in the GOODS fields to search for z-band dropouts as candidates of galaxies at z > 7. In total, six promising candidates have been found in ~ 300 sq. arcmin to J_AB ~ 24.5 mag corresponding to restframe MUV < -22.5 mag at z ~ 7. By constrast, the galaxy luminosity function LF suggested in BI06 would predict at most 3--5 galaxies over the entire 2-pi sky at this brightness level. Here we propose to observe these candidates with NIC3 in F110W and F160W to further investigate their nature. If any of these candidates are indeed at z > 7, the result will lead to a completely new picture of star formation in the early universe. If none of our candidates are consistent with being at z > 7, then the depth and area of our near-IR survey from which the candidates are drawn will let us set a very stringent upper limit on the bright end of the galaxy LF at those redshift. As a result, our program will still be able to provide new clues about the processes of early galaxy formation, such as their dust contents and their merging time scale Yan et al. 2006.;
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