The Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS) and the Brightest High-z Galaxies
astro-ph.GA
/ Authors
Brett Salmon, Dan Coe, Larry Bradley, Rychard Bouwens, Marusa Bradac, Kuang-Han Huang, Pascal Oesch, Daniel Stark, Keren Sharon, Michele Trenti
and 24 more authors
Roberto J. Avila, Sara Ogaz, Felipe Andrade-Santos, Daniela Carrasco, Catherine Cerny, William Dawson, Brenda L. Frye, Austin Hoag, Traci Lin Johnson, Christine Jones, Daniel Lam, Lorenzo Lovisari, Ramesh Mainali, Matt Past, Rachel Paterno-Mahler, Avery Peterson, Adam Riess, Steven A. Rodney, Russel Ryan, Irene Sendra-Server, Lou Strolger, Keiichi Umetsu, Benedetta Vulcani
/ 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 arcmin^2. These clusters were selected to be excellent lenses and we find similar high-redshift sample sizes and magnitude distributions as CLASH. We discover 321 candidate galaxies with photometric redshifts between z ~ 6 to z ~ 8, including extremely bright objects with H-band magnitudes of m_AB ~ 23 mag. As a sample, the observed (lensed) magnitudes of these galaxies are among the brightest known at z> 6, comparable to 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.