HST imaging of the brightest z~8-9 galaxies from UltraVISTA: the extreme bright end of the UV luminosity function

Mauro Stefanon, Ivo Labbé, Rychard J. Bouwens, Gabriel B. Brammer, Pascal Oesch, Marijn Franx, Johan P. U. Fynbo, Bo Milvang-Jensen, Adam Muzzin, Garth D. Illingworth, Olivier Le Fèvre, Karina I. Caputi, Benne W. Holwerda, Henry J. McCracken, Renske Smit, Dan Magee

Published 2017-06-14Version 1

We report on the discovery of three especially bright candidate $z_{phot} \gtrsim 8$ galaxies. Five sources were targeted for follow-up with HST/WFC3, selected from a larger sample of 16 bright ($24.8 \lesssim H\lesssim25.5$~mag) candidate $z\gtrsim 8$ LBGs identified over the 1.6 degrees$^2$ of the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. These were identified as $Y$ and $J$ dropouts by leveraging the deep ($Y$-to-$K_\mathrm{S} \sim 25.6-25.2$~mag, $5\sigma$) NIR data from the UltraVISTA DR3 release, deep ground based optical imaging from the CFHTLS and Subaru Suprime Cam programs and Spitzer/IRAC mosaics combining observations from the SMUVS and SPLASH programs. Through the refined spectral energy distributions, which now also include new HyperSuprime Cam $g, r, i, z,$ and $Y$ band data, we confirm that 3/5 galaxies have robust $z_{phot}\sim8.0-8.7$, consistent with the initial selection. The remaining 2/5 galaxies have a nominal $z_{phot}\sim2$. However, if we use the HST data alone, these objects have increased probability of being at $z\sim9$. Furthermore, we measure mean UV continuum slopes $\beta=-1.97\pm0.23$ for the three $z\sim8-9$ galaxies, marginally bluer than similarly luminous $z\sim4-6$ in CANDELS but consistent with previous measurements of similarly luminous galaxies at $z \sim 7$. The circularized effective radius for our brightest source is $0.9\pm0.2$ kpc, consistent with previous measurements for a bright $z\sim11$ galaxy and bright $z\sim7$ galaxies. Finally, using the $1/V_\mathrm{max}$ formalism, we estimate for the first time the volume density of the extreme bright ($M_\mathrm{UV}\lesssim -22$~mag) end of the $z\sim8$ UV LF from actual detection of sources, as opposed to current upper limits from non-detections. Despite this exceptional result, the still large statistical uncertainties do not allow us to discriminate between a Schechter and a double power-law form.