Paper: The Complete CEERS Early Universe Galaxy Sample: A Surprisingly Slow Evolution of the Space Density of Bright Galaxies at z ∼ 8.5–14.5
Authors: Steven L. Finkelstein, Gene C. K. Leung, Micaela B. Bagley, Mark Dickinson, Henry C. Ferguson, Casey Papovich, Hollis B. Akins, Pablo Arrabal Haro, Romeel Davé, Avishai Dekel, Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe, Dale D. Kocevski, Anton M. Koekemoer, Nor Pirzkal, Rachel S. Somerville, L. Y. Aaron Yung, Ricardo O. Amorín, Bren E. Backhaus, Peter Behroozi, Laura Bisigello, Volker Bromm, Caitlin M. Casey, Óscar A. Chávez Ortiz, Yingjie Cheng, Katherine Chworowsky, Nikko J. Cleri, M. C. Cooper, Kelcey Davis, Alexander de la Vega, David Elbaz, Maximilien Franco, Adriano Fontana, Seiji Fujimoto, Mauro Giavalisco, Norman A. Grogin, Benne W. Holwerda, Marc Huertas-Company, Michaela Hirschmann, Kartheik G. Iyer, Shardha Jogee, Intae Jung, Rebecca L. Larson, Ray A. Lucas, Bahram Mobasher, Alexa M. Morales, Caroline V. Morley, Sagnick Mukherjee, Pablo G. Pérez-González, Swara Ravindranath, Giulia Rodighiero, Melanie J. Rowland, Sandro Tacchella, Anthony J. Taylor, Jonathan R. Trump, Stephen M. Wilkins
Figure caption: The evolution of the rest-frame UV luminosity function, at z ∼ 11 (9.7 < z best ≤ 13; top), z ∼ 9 (8.5 < z best ≤ 9.7; bottom left), and z ∼ 14 (13 < z best ≤ 15; bottom right). The large circles show the calculated number densities from our sample (the small red circles denote the magnitudes of individual galaxies, offset vertically for clarity), while the squares show the results from NGDEEP (Leung et al. 2023). The inset shows the stacked ﹩{ \mathcal P }(z)﹩ for each sample, with the dotted line denoting the median value of the ﹩{ \mathcal P }(z)﹩. Arrows show 1σ upper limits in the first bin with no galaxies, while white filled symbols denote bins that are <20% complete. The black circle in the brightest bin at z ∼ 9 indicates that this bin has only one object, the z = 8.7 galaxy (which has AGN signatures) from Larson et al. (2022). Small symbols show literature results. At z ∼ 9 the HST results are from McLeod et al. (2016), Morishita et al. (2018), Bouwens et al. (2019), Stefanon et al. (2019), Bowler et al. (2020), Rojas-Ruiz et al. (2020), Bouwens et al. (2021), Bagley et al. (2024a), and Finkelstein et al. (2022a), while the JWST results are from Harikane et al. (2023a), Bouwens et al. (2023b), Donnan et al. (2023a), Pérez-González et al. (2023b), and Adams et al. (2024). The z ∼ 11 results shown are from Donnan et al. (2023b), Harikane et al. (2023a), Bouwens et al. (2023b), Donnan et al. (2023a), Pérez-González et al. (2023b), Adams et al. (2024), Casey et al. (2024), Castellano et al. (2023), Franco et al. (2023), and McLeod et al. (2024), while at z ∼ 14 we compare to Donnan et al. (2023a) and Casey et al. (2024). The gray curves show the best-fitting DPL model from Finkelstein & Bagley (2022) from z = 5 to 8, while the light-shaded colored region shows this model empirically extrapolated to the median redshift for a given sample (where the width is the 68% uncertainty on the luminosity function at this redshift from Finkelstein & Bagley 2022). Our CEERS results are generally consistent with previous luminosity function estimates, with smaller uncertainties reflecting our larger sample size. We also note excellent agreement with the NGDEEP results where our samples overlap. Our brighter CEERS results sit above the expected number densities for the empirically expected extrapolation from Finkelstein & Bagley (2022), with this offset increasing to higher redshift.