The Bright End of the z~9 and z~10 UV Luminosity Functions using all five CANDELS Fields

Understand

The deep, wide-area (~800-900 arcmin**2) near-infrared/WFC3/IR + Spitzer/IRAC observations over the CANDELS fields have been a remarkable resource for constraining the bright end of high redshift UV luminosity functions (LFs).

• However, the lack of HST 1.05-micron observations over the CANDELS fields has made it difficult to identify z~9-10 sources robustly, since such data are needed to confirm the presence of an abrupt Lyman break at 1.2 microns.
• We report here on the successful identification of many such z~9-10 sources from a new HST program (z9-CANDELS) that targets the highest-probability z~9-10 galaxy candidates with observations at 1.05 microns, to search for a robust Lyman-break at 1.2 microns.
• The potential z~9-10 candidates are preselected from the full HST, Spitzer/IRAC S-CANDELS observations, and the deepest-available ground-based optical+near-infrared observations.