Ultraviolet Luminosity Density of the Universe During the Epoch of Reionization

Authors

Ketron Mitchell-Wynne, University of California - Irvine
Asantha Cooray, University of California - Irvine
Yan Gong, University of California - Irvine
Matthew Ashby, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Timothy Dolch, Cornell University
Henry Ferguson, Space Telescope Science Institute
Steven Finkelstein, University of Texas at Austin
Norman Grogin, Space Telescope Science Institute
Dale D. Kocevski, University of KentuckyFollow
Anton Koekemoer, Space Telescope Science Institute
Joel Primack, University of California - Santa Cruz
Joseph Smidt, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Abstract

The spatial fluctuations of the extragalactic background light trace the total emission from all stars and galaxies in the Universe. A multiwavelength study can be used to measure the integrated emission from first galaxies during reionization when the Universe was about 500 million years old. Here we report arcmin-scale spatial fluctuations in one of the deepest sky surveys with the Hubble Space Telescope in five wavebands between 0.6 and 1.6 μm. We model-fit the angular power spectra of intensity fluctuation measurements to find the ultraviolet luminosity density of galaxies at redshifts greater than 8 to be log ρ_UV = 27.4^+0.2_-1.2ergs^-1Hz^-1Mpc^-3(1σ). This level of integrated light emission allows for a significant surface density of fainter primeval galaxies that are below the point-source detection level in current surveys.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-8-2015

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Nature Communications, v. 6, article 7945, p. 1-13.

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Funding Information

This work is based on observations taken by the CANDELS Multi-Cycle Treasury Program with the NASA/ESA HST, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A.C. acknowledges support from NSF CAREER AST-06455427, AST-1310310, and STScI Archival Research program.

Repository Citation

Mitchell-Wynne, Ketron; Cooray, Asantha; Gong, Yan; Ashby, Matthew; Dolch, Timothy; Ferguson, Henry; Finkelstein, Steven; Grogin, Norman; Kocevski, Dale D.; Koekemoer, Anton; Primack, Joel; and Smidt, Joseph, "Ultraviolet Luminosity Density of the Universe During the Epoch of Reionization" (2015). Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications. 360.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/physastron_facpub/360