The Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies Survey: Constraints on the Bright End of the z~8 Luminosity Function

Understand

We report the discovery of 33 Lyman break galaxy (LBG) candidates at z~8 detected in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) imaging as part of the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) pure-parallel survey.

• The ongoing BoRG survey currently has the largest area (274 arcmin^2) with Y_098 (or Y_105), J_125, and H_160 band coverage needed to search for z~8 galaxies, about three times the current CANDELS area, and slightly larger than what will be the final CANDELS wide component with Y_105 data.
• Our sample of 33 relatively bright Y_098-dropout galaxies have J_125 band magnitudes between 25.5 and 27.4 mag.
• This is the largest sample of bright (J_125 <~ 27.4) z~8 galaxy candidates presented to date.