Galaxy Size Evolution at High Redshift and Surface Brightness Selection Effects: Constraints from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

By R. Bouwens, G. Illingworth, J. Blakeslee, T. Broadhurst, M. Franx. 2004

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We use the exceptional depth of the Ultra Deep Field (UDF) and UDF-parallel Advanced Camera for Surveys fields to study the sizes of high-redshift (z ~ 2-6) galaxies and address long-standing questions about possible biases in the cosmic star formation rate due to surface brightness dimming. Contrasting B-, V-, and i-dropout samples culled from the deeper data with those obtained from the shallower Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey fields, we demonstrate that the shallower data are essentially complete at bright magnitudes to z ≲ 5.5 and that the principal effect of depth is to add objects at the magnitude limit. This indicates that high-redshift galaxies are compact in size (~0.″1-0.″3) and that large (≳0.″4, ≳3 kpc) low surface brightness galaxies are rare. A simple comparison of the half-light radii of the Hubble Deep Field-North + Hubble Deep Field-South U-dropouts with B-, V-, and i-dropouts from the UDF shows that the sizes follow a (1 + z)-1.05±0.21 scaling toward high redshift. A more rigorous measurement compares different scalings of our U-dropout sample with the mean profiles for a set of intermediate-magnitude (26.0 < z850, AB < 27.5) i-dropouts from the UDF. The best fit is found with a (1 + z) size scaling (for fixed luminosity). This result is then verified by repeating this experiment with different size measures, low-redshift samples, and magnitude ranges. Very similar scalings are found for all comparisons. A robust measurement of size evolution is thereby demonstrated for galaxies from z ~ 6 to 2.5 using data from the UDF.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3254c527bb189c43dd8c717a95271cf243e3349

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Citations in the corpus

Determining the Properties and Evolution of Red Galaxies from the Quasar Luminosity Function (2005, result): “…at most weakly with redshift, in agreement with observations (Trujillo & Aguerri 2004; Trujillo et al. 2004, 2005; McIntosh et al. 2005b) (see also e.g. Ferguson et al. 2004; Bouwens et al. 2004; Papovich et al. 2005, although these authors do not separate the relation by morphological type).”
THE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF LYMAN BREAK GALAXIES BETWEEN REDSHIFT 4 AND 6: OBSERVING SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS OF MASSIVE GALAXIES IN FORMATION (2009, methodology): “We also exclude unphysicallylow age steps (e.g., below the dynamical timescale for LBGs at high-redshift), which we take to be ≃ 20 Myr adopting measurements of the mean half-light radii (Bouwens et al. 2004) and typical velocity dispersions (Erb et al. 2006) of LBGs at high-redshift.”
Resolved Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Star Formation in Disks at High Redshift (2007, methodology): “Bouwens et al. (2003) found a 1.7 times increase in size for a mixture of morphological types from z ¼ 5 to 2.7 based on HDF data, and Bouwens et al. (2004, 2006) observed size evolution from z ¼ 6 to 2.6 for amixture of types in theUDF data.”
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2003, background): “…to appreciate the richness of the data and its interpretations, including Bunker et al. 2004 (the first published paper); Yan and Windhorst 2004; Stiavelli, Fall, and Panagia 2004a,b; Stanway et al. 2004; Bouwens et al. 2004a,b; Thompson et al. 2004, Stanway et al. 2005, and Straughn et al. 2006.”
SIMULATION OF THE COSMIC EVOLUTION OF ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR HYDROGEN IN GALAXIES (2009, background): “As shown by Mo et al. (1998), rvir scales as (1 + z)−1.5 for a fixed circular velocity or as (1 + z)−1 for a fixed halo mass, consistent with high-redshift observations (z = 2.5 − 6) in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) by Bouwens et al. (2004).”
DISCOVERY OF z ∼ 8 GALAXIES IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD FROM ULTRA-DEEP WFC3/IR OBSERVATIONS (2009, methodology): “…we model the pixel-by-pixel profiles of galaxies at z∼8 with similar-luminosity galaxies from the z ∼ 4 Bouwens et al. (2007) HUDF B dropout sample, but scaled in size to match the observed (1+ z)−1 size-redshift scaling (Oesch et al. 2010b; Bouwens et al. 2004, 2006; Ferguson et al. 2004).”
z ~ 7-10 Galaxies in the HUDF and GOODS Fields: UV Luminosity Functions (2008, methodology): “Our sample also includes one z850-dropout (UDF-380-1125) which, while appearing in the our initial z-dropout selection over the HUDF (Bouwens et al. 2004c), did not appear in our more recent Bouwens & 7 Illingworth (2006) selection because of the more conservative S/N threshold used in that work.”
A CENSUS OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES IN THE Z ∼ 9–10 UNIVERSE BASED ON HST+SPITZER OBSERVATIONS OVER 19 CLASH CLUSTERS: THREE CANDIDATE Z ∼ 9–10 GALAXIES AND IMPROVED CONSTRAINTS ON THE STAR FORMATION RATE DENSITY AT Z ∼ 9.2 (2012, unknown): “…to z ∼ 4-5 (e.g., Madau et al. 1996; Steidel et al. 1999), z ∼ 6 (e.g., Stanway et al. 2003; Bouwens et al. 2003; Dickinson et al. 2004), z ∼ 7 (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2004; Yan & Windhorst 2004; Bouwens & Illingworth 2006b; Iye et al. 2006; Fontana et al. 2009; Schenker et al. 2012), and z ∼ 8…”
THE HST EXTREME DEEP FIELD (XDF): COMBINING ALL ACS AND WFC3/IR DATA ON THE HUDF REGION INTO THE DEEPEST FIELD EVER (2013, methodology): “The NICMOS near-IR camera provided the first glimpse of galaxies at z ∼ 7 (Bouwens et al. 2004b; Yan & Windhorst 2004), just 800 Myr after the Big Bang (Thompson et al. 2005), but it was not until the new infrared Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3/IR) was added to Hubble in 2009 by the Shuttle astronauts in”
UVUDF: ULTRAVIOLET THROUGH NEAR-INFRARED CATALOG AND PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS OF GALAXIES IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD (2015, background): “…evolution in the star formation rate density (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2007, 2009, 2010), to determine the morphological properties of galaxies (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2004; Elmegreen et al. 2005c; Straughn et al. 2006; Hathi et al. 2008a; Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2010; Oesch et al. 2010b; Elmegreen &…”
Cosmic evolution of the atomic and molecular gas contents of galaxies (2011, result): “Observationally, galaxies of the same rest-frame UV luminosity seem to be a factor≈ 2 − 3 smaller at z ≈ 6 than atz ≈ 2 (e.g. Bouwens et al. 2004; Oesch et al. 2010), in good agreement with the factor of≈ 2 − 3 evolution in size predicted by the Bow06.”
The star formation rate of the Universe at z~ 6 from the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2004, methodology): “The conclusion of Bouwens et al. (2003) – that the comoving star formation at z ≈ 6 is consistent with no evolution from z ≈ 4 – is revised in Bouwens et al. (2004a) to be a factor of 3 decline from z = 3.8 to z ≈ 6.”
Galaxies at z ~ 6: The UV Luminosity Function and Luminosity Density from 506 HUDF, HUDF Parallel ACS Field, and GOODS i-Dropouts (2005, methodology): “The inputs to the simulations consisted of B-dropout samples from both the HUDF-Ps (Bouwens et al. 2004b) and the HUDF (Bouwens et al. 2004b).”
Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Imaging of Red and Blue Galaxies at z ~ 2.5: A Correlation between Size and Star Formation Activity from Compact Quiescent Galaxies to Extended Star-forming Galaxies (2007, background): “…conclusions about the size distribution and structural properties of LBGs based on their observed optical properties (e.g., Ferguson et al. 2004; Bouwens et al. 2004) are probably ‘‘correct’’ since their rest-frame UV structure is likely to be representative of their rest-frame optical…”
The Rest-Frame Far-Ultraviolet Morphologies of Star-Forming Galaxies at z ~ 1.5 and 4 (2006, background): “…and compact objects like LBGs. LBGs at z 4 have typical rest-frame far-ultraviolet (FUV) half-light radii between 0B1 and 1B0 (Ferguson et al. 2004; Bouwens et al. 2004), and therefore many LBGs with sizes below a few tenths of an arcsecond are not spatially resolved enough to measure their…”
Characterizing the Cluster Lens Population (2005, background): “…because the size distribution of galaxies is broad (Ferguson et al. 2004) and the luminosities and sizes of high redshift galaxies are correlated (Bouwens et al. 2004; Trujillo et al. 2004), simply using the mean size to convert a limiting surface brightness to a limiting magnitude will not give…”