UV-Continuum Slopes of >4000 z~4-8 Galaxies from the HUDF/XDF, HUDF09, ERS, CANDELS-South, and CANDELS-North Fields

Understand

We measure the UV-continuum slope beta for over 4000 high-redshift galaxies over a wide range of redshifts z~4-8 and luminosities from the HST HUDF/XDF, HUDF09-1, HUDF09-2, ERS, CANDELS-N, and CANDELS-S data sets.

• Our new beta results reach very faint levels at z~4 (-15.5 mag: 0.006 L*(z=3)), z~5 (-16.5 mag: 0.014L*(z=3)), and z~6 and z~7 (-17 mag: 0.025 L*(z=3)).
• Inconsistencies between previous studies led us to conduct a comprehensive review of systematic errors and develop a new technique for measuring beta that is robust against biases that arise from the impact of noise.
• We demonstrate, by object-by-object comparisons, that all previous studies, including our own and those done on the latest HUDF12 dataset, suffer from small systematic errors in beta.