Medium Bands, Mega Science: a JWST/NIRCam Medium-Band Imaging Survey of Abell 2744
Abstract
In this paper, we describe the "Medium Bands, Mega Science" JWST Cycle 2 survey (JWST-GO-4111) and demonstrate the power of these data to reveal both the spatially-integrated and spatially-resolved properties of galaxies from the local universe to the era of cosmic dawn. Executed in November 2023, MegaScience obtained ~30 arcmin^2 of deep multiband NIRCam imaging centered on the z~0.3 Abell 2744 cluster, including eleven medium-band filters and the two shortest-wavelength broad-band filters, F070W and F090W. Together, MegaScience and the UNCOVER Cycle 1 treasury program provide a complete set of deep (~28-30 mag) images in all NIRCam medium- and broad-band filters. This unique dataset allows us to precisely constrain photometric redshifts, map stellar populations and dust attenuation for large samples of distant galaxies, and examine the connection between galaxy structures and formation histories. MegaScience also includes ~17 arcmin^2 of NIRISS parallel imaging in two broad-band and four medium-band filters from 0.9-4.8um, expanding the footprint where robust spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting is possible. We provide example SEDs and multi-band cutouts at a variety of redshifts, and use a catalog of JWST spectroscopic redshifts to show that MegaScience improves both the scatter and catastrophic outlier rate of photometric redshifts by factors of 2-3. Additionally, we demonstrate the spatially-resolved science enabled by MegaScience by presenting maps of the [OIII] line emission and continuum emission in three spectroscopically-confirmed z>6 galaxies. We show that line emission in reionization-era galaxies can be clumpy, extended, and spatially offset from continuum emission, implying that galaxy assembly histories are complex even at these early epochs. We publicly release fully reduced mosaics and photometric catalogs for both the NIRCam primary and NIRISS parallel fields.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2404.13132,
title = {Medium Bands, Mega Science: a JWST/NIRCam Medium-Band Imaging Survey of Abell 2744},
author = {Katherine A. Suess and John R. Weaver and Sedona H. Price and Richard Pan and Bingjie Wang and Rachel Bezanson and Gabriel Brammer and Sam E. Cutler and Ivo Labbe and Joel Leja and Christina C. Williams and Katherine E. Whitaker and Pratika Dayal and Anna de Graaff and Robert Feldmann and Marijn Franx and Yoshinobu Fudamoto and Seiji Fujimoto and Lukas J. Furtak and Andy D. Goulding and Jenny E. Greene and Gourav Khullar and Vasily Kokorev and Mariska Kriek and Brian Lorenz and Danilo Marchesini and Michael V. Maseda and Jorryt Matthee and Tim B. Miller and Ikki Mitsuhashi and Lamiya A. Mowla and Adam Muzzin and Rohan P. Naidu and Themiya Nanayakkara and Erica J. Nelson and Pascal A. Oesch and David J. Setton and Heath Shipley and Renske Smit and Justin S. Spilker and Pieter van Dokkum and Adi Zitrin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.13132},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
21 pages, 10 figures. Fully reduced imaging, photometric catalogs, and photometric redshift fits publicly available at https://jwst-uncover.github.io/megascience/