A European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope Survey of Near‐Infrared (Z≤ 25) Selected Galaxies at Redshifts 4.5 <z< 6: Constraining the Cosmic Star Formation Rate near the Reionization Epoch

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We present the results of a VLT and HST imaging survey aimed at the identification of 4.54.5 galaxies. The resulting integral surface density of the Z4.5z is in the range 0.13-0.44/arcmin^2 and that in the highest redshift bin 5<z<6 is between 0.07-0.13/arcmin^2. In the two HDFs, we identify at I<27.2 25 galaxies in the range 4.5<z<5 and 16 at 5<z<6$, corresponding to surface densities of 3.1 arcmin^-2 and 2 arcmin^-2, respectively. We show that the observed Z<25 UV luminosity density appear to drop by about one order of magnitude from z~3 to z~6. However, if we apply a threshold to obtain an absolute--magnitude limited sample, the UV luminosity density results to be roughly constant up to z~6. We finally show that recent semi-analytic hierarchical models for galaxy formation, while predicting a nearly constant total UV luminosity density up to z~6, under-predict the observed UV luminosity density at Z<25 and over-predicts the I<27.2 one. This behaviour can be understood in term of a poor match to the slope of the UV luminosity function.Comment: Accepted for publication on Ap
All Related Versions

This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit: