Paper: JWST PEARLS. Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science: Project Overview and First Results
Authors: Rogier A. Windhorst, Seth H. Cohen, Rolf A. Jansen, Jake Summers, Scott Tompkins, Christopher J. Conselice, Simon P. Driver, Haojing Yan, Dan Coe, Brenda Frye, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, Madeline A. Marshall, Rosalia O'Brien, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell E. Ryan, Christopher N. A. Willmer, Timothy Carleton, Jose M. Diego, William C. Keel, Paolo Porto, Caleb Redshaw, Sydney Scheller, Stephen M. Wilkins, S. P. Willner, Adi Zitrin, Nathan J. Adams, Duncan Austin, Richard G. Arendt, John F. Beacom, Rachana A. Bhatawdekar, Larry D. Bradley, Tom Broadhurst, Cheng Cheng, Francesca Civano, Liang Dai, Hervé Dole, Jordan C. J. D'Silva, Kenneth J. Duncan, Giovanni G. Fazio, Giovanni Ferrami, Leonardo Ferreira, Steven L. Finkelstein, Lukas J. Furtak, Hansung B. Gim, Alex Griffiths, Heidi B. Hammel, Kevin C. Harrington, Nimish P. Hathi, Benne W. Holwerda, Rachel Honor, Jia-Sheng Huang, Minhee Hyun, Myungshin Im, Bhavin A. Joshi, Patrick S. Kamieneski, Patrick Kelly, Rebecca L. Larson, Juno Li, Jeremy Lim, Zhiyuan Ma, Peter Maksym, Giorgio Manzoni, Ashish Kumar Meena, Stefanie N. Milam, Mario Nonino, Massimo Pascale, Andreea Petric, Justin D. R. Pierel, Maria del Carmen Polletta, Huub J. A. Röttgering, Michael J. Rutkowski, Ian Smail, Amber N. Straughn, Louis-Gregory Strolger, Andi Swirbul, James A. A. Trussler, Lifan Wang, Brian Welch, J. Stuart B. Wyithe, Min Yun, Erik Zackrisson, Jiashuo Zhang, Xiurui Zhao
Figure caption: Summary of astrophysical foreground and background energy relevant to PEARLS. Dark brown filled upward-pointing triangles with error bars indicate the PEARLS NIRCam 0.9–4.5 μm IGL measurements of Section 4 (discrete light), and are lower limits to the total EBL. Dark brown downward-pointing triangles with the gray error wedge indicate our current JWIDF and El Gordo noncluster module 0.9–4.5 μm upper limits to diffuse light, with all known components subtracted (see error budget in Section 5 and Appendix C), and are in line with previous limits to diffuse light. (Brown starred and tripod symbols indicate the less accurate VV191 and TNJ limits.) Green triangles show our 0.9–4.5 μm PEARLS NIRCam sky-SB observations in the El Gordo noncluster module compared to the models of Section 5 and Figure 12 (green solid line). The left scale indicates the total energy ν. I  ν  in nW m−2 sr−1, and the right scale shows the corresponding sky-SB in AB-mag arcsec−2 at 2.00 μm (which can be scaled to other wavelengths as indicated). Filled circles show previous IGL counts of Driver et al. (2016a; red) and Koushan et al. (2021; orange). Solid and dashed colored lines show the (component and total) discrete EBL models from Andrews et al. (2018). The orange line and hashed area show γ-ray Blazar EBL constraints from the MAGIC TeV experiments (see, e.g., Dwek & Krennrich 2013, for a summary), and light gray triangles indicate total EBL estimates that require accurate modeling of DGL and ZL and still include the IGL (direct light). Purple triangles show the Matsuura et al. (2017) and Sano et al. (2020) CIBER estimates of diffuse light in excess of the Kelsall et al. (1998) model prediction. Dark blue upper limits are the SKYSURF 1.25–1.6 μm diffuse light limits from 34,000 WFC3/IR images of of Carleton et al. (2022) and Windhorst et al. (2022). Light blue circles with error bars at 0.61 μm are the Lauer et al. (2021, 2022) diffuse light estimates with New Horizons at 43–51 au. All diffuse light estimates plotted in color have the IGL (=iEBL+eEBL) already subtracted. See Carleton et al. (2022) for a discussion of possible causes of any remaining diffuse light.