An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at $z>3$ in Public $JWST$ Fields

TL;DR

This study builds an atlas of color-selected quiescent galaxies at $z>3$ using 11 public JWST fields, combining JWST with HST data to identify ~80 candidate quiescent/quenching galaxies in $3<z<5$ via rest-frame UVJ colors and a Gaussian Mixture Modeling approach in $(NUV-U, U-V, V-J)$ color space. It reports comoving number densities for massive ($\log(M_\star/M_\odot)\ge 10.6$) quiescent galaxies broadly consistent with previous ground-based estimates after homogenization, but reveals significant field-to-field variations up to a factor of $2-3$ due to cosmic variance and possible overdensities at $z>3$. The results demonstrate JWST's ability to detect quenching candidates at lower masses and higher redshifts than before, challenging standard formation scenarios, and all data products are publicly available.

Abstract

We present the results of a systematic search for candidate quiescent galaxies in the distant Universe in eleven $JWST$ fields with publicly available observations collected during the first three months of operations and covering an effective sky area of $\sim145$ arcmin$^2$. We homogeneously reduce the new $JWST$ data and combine them with existing observations from the $Hubble\,Space\,Telescope$. We select a robust sample of $\sim80$ 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 $NUV-U$, $U-V$, and $V-J$ rest-frame color space, which is more sensitive to recently quenched objects. We measure comoving number densities of massive ($M_\star\geq 10^{10.6} M_\odot$) 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 it 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.