RELICS: The Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey and the Brightest High-z Galaxies

Creators: Salmon, Brett; Coe, Dan; Bradley, Larry; Bouwens, Rychard; Bradač, M.; Huang, Kuang-Han; Oesch, Pascal A.; Stark, Daniel; Sharon, Keren; Trenti, Michele; Avila, Roberto J.; Ogaz, Sara; Andrade-Santos, Felipe; Carrasco, Daniela; Cerny, Catherine; Dawson, William; Frye, Brenda L.; Hoag, Austin; Johnson, Traci Lin; Jones, Christine; Lam, Daniel; Lovisari, Lorenzo; Mainali, Ramesh; Past, Matt; Paterno-Mahler, Rachel; Peterson, Avery; Riess, Adam G.; Rodney, Steven A.; Sendra-Server, Irene; Strait, Victoria; Strolger, Louis-Gregory; Umetsu, Keiichi; Vulcani, Benedetta; Zitrin, Adi

Abstract

Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations. We present here the z ~ 6-8 candidate high-redshift galaxies from the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS), a Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 41 massive galaxy clusters spanning an area of ≈200 arcmin². These clusters were selected to be excellent lenses, and we find similar high-redshift sample sizes and magnitude distributions as the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH). We discover 257, 57, and eight candidate galaxies at z ~ 6, 7, and 8 respectively, (322 in total). The observed (lensed) magnitudes of the z ~ 6 candidates are as bright as AB mag ~23, making them among the brightest known at these redshifts, comparable with discoveries from much wider, blank-field surveys. RELICS demonstrates the efficiency of using strong gravitational lenses to produce high-redshift samples in the epoch of reionization. These brightly observed galaxies are excellent targets for follow-up study with current and future observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope.

Additional Information

© 2020. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 May 31; revised 2019 July 30; accepted 2019 July 31; published 2020 February 5. We thank Gabriel Brammer for insightful discussions related to this work. This paper is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. ACS was developed under NASA contract NAS 5-32864. The Spitzer Space Telescope is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. These observations are associated with program GO-14096. Archival data are associated with programs GO-9270, GO-12166, GO-12477, and GO-12253. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). This research made use of Photutils, an Astropy package for detection and photometry of astronomical sources (Bradley et al. 2019). This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018). This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. F.A.-S. acknowledges support from Chandra grant G03-14131X. M.B. and V.S. acknowledge support by NASA through ADAP grant 80NSSC18K0945, NASA/HST through HST-GO-14096, HST-GO-13666 and two awards issued by Spitzer/JPL/Caltech associated with SRELICS_DEEP and SRELICS programs.

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