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Published September 20, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Near-infrared Survey of the GOODS-North Field: Search for Luminous Galaxy Candidates at z ≳ 6.5

Abstract

We present near-infrared (NIR; J and K_s) survey of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-N) field. The publicly available imaging data were obtained using the MOIRCS instrument on the 8.2 m Subaru and the WIRCam instrument on the 3.6 m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). These observations fulfill a serious wavelength gap in the GOODS-N data, i.e., lack of deep NIR observations. We combine the Subaru/MOIRCS and CFHT/WIRCam archival data to generate deep J- and K_s-band images, covering the full GOODS-N field (~169 arcmin^2) to an AB magnitude limit of ~25 mag (3σ). We applied z_850-band dropout color selection criteria, using the NIR data generated here. We have identified two possible Lyman break galaxy (LBG) candidates at z ≳ 6.5 with J ≲ 24.5. The first candidate is a likely LBG at z ≃ 6.5 based on a weak spectral feature tentatively identified as Lyα line in the deep Keck/DEIMOS spectrum, while the second candidate is a possible LBG at z ≃ 7 based on its photometric redshift. These z 850-dropout objects, if confirmed, are among the brightest such candidates found so far. At z ≳ 6.5, their star formation rate is estimated as 100-200 M_☉ yr^(–1). If they continue to form stars at this rate, they assemble a stellar mass of ~5 × 10^(10) M_☉ after about 400 million years, becoming the progenitors of massive galaxies observed at z ≃ 5. We study the implication of the z 850-band dropout candidates discovered here, in constraining the bright end of the luminosity function and understanding the nature of high-redshift galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 November 7; accepted 2012 July 23; published 2012 September 4. Based in part on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Based on observations obtained with WIRCam, a joint project of CFHT, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, France, at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, the Institute National des Sciences de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii. We thank the referee for helpful comments and suggestions that significantly improved this paper. We acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from Mark Dickinson. We are grateful to Kyle Penner and Shoubaneh Hemmati for their help in reducing the Keck spectroscopy data. N.P.H. acknowledges support provided by NASA through grants HST-GO-11702.02-A and HST-GO-11359.08-A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.

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August 22, 2023
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