English

JADES: Low Surface Brightness Galaxies at 0.4 < z < 0.8 in GOODS-S

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-02-17 v2

Abstract

Low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) are an important class of galaxies that allow us to broaden our understanding of galaxy formation and test various cosmological models. We present a survey of low surface brightness galaxies at 0.4<zphot<0.80.4 < z_{\rm phot} < 0.8 in the GOODS-S field using JADES data. We model LSB surface brightness profiles, identifying those with μˉeff>24\bar{\mu}_{\rm eff} > 24 mag arcsec2^{-2} in the F200W JWST/NIRCam filter. We study the spatial distribution, number density, S\'{e}rsic profile parameters, and rest-frame colours of these LSBs. We compare the photometrically-derived star formation histories, mass-weighted ages, and dust attenuations of these galaxies with a high surface brightness (HSB) sample at similar redshift and a lower redshift (zphot<0.4z_{\rm phot} < 0.4) LSB sample, all of which have stellar masses 108M\lesssim 10^8 M_{\odot}. We find that all samples have low star formation (SFR1000.01_{100} \lesssim 0.01 MM_{\odot} yr1^{-1}). The higher redshift LSBs and HSBs have similar star formation histories which show that the LSBs and HSBs possibly come from the same progenitors at z2z \gtrsim 2, though the histories are not well constrained for the LSB samples. The LSBs appear to have minimal dust, with most of our LSB samples showing AV<1A_V < 1 mag. JWST has pushed our understanding of LSBs beyond the local Universe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.17738,
  title  = {JADES: Low Surface Brightness Galaxies at 0.4 < z < 0.8 in GOODS-S},
  author = {Tristen Shields and Marcia Rieke and Kevin Hainline and Jakob M. Helton and Andrew J. Bunker and Courtney Carreira and Emma Curtis-Lake and Daniel J. Eisenstein and Benjamin D. Johnson and Pierluigi Rinaldi and Brant Robertson and Christina C. Williams and Christopher N. A. Willmer and Yang Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17738},
  year   = {2026}
}