Evidence for a fast evolution of the UV luminosity function beyond redshift 6 from a deep HAWK-I survey of the GOODS-S field

Understand

We perform a deep search for galaxies in the redshift range 6.5<z<7.5, to measure the evolution of the number density of luminous galaxies in this redshift range and derive useful constraints on the evolution of their Luminosity Function.

• We present here the first results of an ESO Large Program, that exploits the unique combination of area and sensitivity provided in the near-IR by the camera Hawk-I at the VLT.
• We have obtained two Hawk-I pointings on the GOODS South field for a total of 32 observing hours, covering ~90 arcmin2.
• The images reach Y=26.7 mags for the two fields.