An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at z > 3 in Public JWST Fields
Strait, Victoria; Fujimoto, Seiji; Heintz, Kasper E.; Gallazzi, Anna; Brammer, Gabriel; Ilbert, Olivier; Gillman, Steven; Whitaker, Katherine E.; Oesch, Pascal; Toft, Sune; Hirschmann, Michaela; Magdis, Georgios E.; Kubo, Mariko; Ito, Kei; Onodera, Masato; Tanaka, Masayuki; Weaver, John R.; Kokorev, Vasily; Valentino, Francesco; Lee, Minju; Vijayan, Aswin P.; Gould, Katriona M. L.; Gómez-Guijarro, Carlos; Faisst, Andreas L.; Rizzo, Francesca; Giménez-Arteaga, Clara; Jespersen, Christian Kragh
Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, United States, Japan, France, Italy, Switzerland
Abstract
We present the results of a systematic search for candidate quiescent galaxies in the distant universe in 11 JWST fields with publicly available observations collected during the first 3 months of operations and covering an effective sky area of ~145 arcmin2. We homogeneously reduce the new JWST data and combine them with existing observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. We select a robust sample of ~80 candidate quiescent and quenching galaxies at 3 < z < 5 using two methods: (1) based on their rest-frame UVJ colors, and (2) a novel quantitative approach based on Gaussian mixture modeling of the near-UV - U, U - V, and V - J rest-frame color space, which is more sensitive to recently quenched objects. We measure comoving number densities of massive (M ⋆ ≥ 1010.6 M ⊙) quiescent galaxies consistent with previous estimates relying on ground-based observations, after homogenizing the results in the literature with our mass and redshift intervals. However, we find significant field-to-field variations of the number densities up to a factor of 2-3, highlighting the effect of cosmic variance and suggesting the presence of overdensities of red quiescent galaxies at z > 3, as could be expected for highly clustered massive systems. Importantly, JWST enables the robust identification of quenching/quiescent galaxy candidates at lower masses and higher redshifts than before, challenging standard formation scenarios. All data products, including the literature compilation, are made publicly available.