Luminosities, masses and star formation rates of galaxies at high redshift

Abstract

There has been great progress in recent years in discovering star forming galaxies at high redshifts (z > 5), close to the epoch of reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM). The WFC3 and ACS cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope have enabled Lyman break galaxies to be robustly identified, but the UV luminosity function and star formation rate density of this population at z = 6-8 seems to be much lower than at z = 2-4. High escape fractions and a large contribution from faint galaxies below our current detection limits would be required for star-forming galaxies to reionize the Universe. We have also found that these galaxies have blue rest-frame UV colours, which might indicate lower dust extinction at z > 5. There has been some spectroscopic confirmation of these Lyman break galaxies through Lyman-α emission, but the fraction of galaxies where we see this line drops at z > 7, perhaps due to the onset of the Gunn-Peterson effect (where the IGM is opaque to Lyman-α). © 2012 International Astronomical Union.