Accounting for Cosmic Variance in Studies of Gravitationally Lensed High-redshift Galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Field Clusters
Abstract
Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful means for studying faint galaxies in the distant universe. By magnifying the apparent brightness of background sources, massive clusters enable the detection of galaxies fainter than the usual sensitivity limit for blank fields. However, this gain in effective sensitivity comes at the cost of a reduced survey volume and, in this Letter, we demonstrate that there is an associated increase in the cosmic variance uncertainty. As an example, we show that the cosmic variance uncertainty of the high-redshift population viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Field cluster Abell 2744 increases from ~35% at redshift z ~ 7 to ≳65% at z ~ 10. Previous studies of high-redshift galaxies identified in the Frontier Fields have underestimated the cosmic variance uncertainty that will affect the ultimate constraints on both the faint-end slope of the high-redshift luminosity function and the cosmic star formation rate density, key goals of the Frontier Field program.
Additional Information
© 2014 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 October 3; accepted 2014 October 16; published 2014 November 18. We thank Hakim Atek for providing tabulated data. B.E.R. is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1228509, grant No. NSF PHY11-25915 which funds the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and by the Space Telescope Science Institute under award HST-GO-12498.01-A. J.S.D. acknowledges the support of the European Research Council via the award of an Advanced Grant, and the contribution of the EC FP7 SPACE project ASTRODEEP (Ref. No. 312725). R.J.M. acknowledges ERC funding via the award of a consolidator grant (PI: McLure).Attached Files
Published - 2041-8205_796_2_L27.pdf
Submitted - 1410.0962v2.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 52954
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141217-103305633
- 1228509
- NSF
- PHY11-25915
- NSF
- HST-GO-12498.01-A
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- European Research Council (European Union)
- 312725
- EC FP7 SPACE project ASTRODEEP
- Created
-
2014-12-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field