The Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS) and the Brightest High-z Galaxies

Understand

Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.

• We present here the z ~ 6 - 8 candidate high-redshift galaxies from the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS), a Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 41 massive galaxy clusters spanning an area of ~200 arcmin^2.
• These clusters were selected to be excellent lenses and we find similar high-redshift sample sizes and magnitude distributions as CLASH.
• We discover 321 candidate galaxies with photometric redshifts between z ~ 6 to z ~ 8, including extremely bright objects with H-band magnitudes of m_AB ~ 23 mag.