English

Delving deep: a population of extremely dusty dwarfs observed by JWST

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-08-09 v2

Abstract

We take advantage of the NIRCam photometric observations available as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science survey (CEERS) to identify and analyse very red sources in an effort to discover very dusty star forming galaxies. We select red galaxies as objects with a S/N>3 at 4.4 μ\mum and a S/N<2 in all JWST and HST filters at λ2μ\lambda\leq2\mum, which corresponds to [F200W]-[F444W]>1.2 considering CEERS depths. This selection is ideal to identify very dusty (Av>1 mag) galaxies with stellar masses between 10610^6 to 1010M10^{10}\, \rm M_{\odot} at z<5, more massive dusty galaxies at z=5-18 and galaxies at z>18 due to the Lyman absorption, independently of their dust extinction. Our sample of F200W-dropouts contains no strong candidates at z>6.5, instead it consists almost completely (~81%) of z<2 low-mass galaxies, with a median stellar mass of 107.3M10^{7.3} \rm M_{\odot}. These galaxies show an exceptional dust extinction with median value of Av=4.9 mag, completely unexpected given their low stellar mass. The remaining galaxies, which are at z<6.5, show similar large dust extinction (Av>1), but they are generally more massive >107.5M>10^{7.5}\rm M_{\odot}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.12270,
  title  = {Delving deep: a population of extremely dusty dwarfs observed by JWST},
  author = {L. Bisigello and G. Gandolfi and A. Grazian and G. Rodighiero and L. Costantin and A. R. Cooray and A. Feltre and C. Gruppioni and N. P. Hathi and B. W. Holwerda and A. M. Koekemoer and R. A. Lucas and J. A. Newman and P. G. Pérez-González and L. Y. A. Yung and A. de la Vega and P. Arrabal Haro and M. B. Bagley and M. Dickinson and S. L. Finkelstein and J. S. Kartaltepe and C. Papovich and N. Pirzkal and S. Wilkins},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12270},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

30 pages, 1 table, 19 figures, accepted for publication in A&A