The Extreme Faint End of the UV Luminosity Function at $z\sim6$ Through Gravitational Telescopes: a comprehensive assessment of strong lensing uncertainties

Understand

With the Hubble Frontier Fields program, gravitational lensing has provided a powerful way to extend the study of the ultraviolet luminosity function (LF) of galaxies at $z \sim 6$ down to unprecedented magnitude limits.

• At the same time, significant discrepancies between different studies were found at the very faint end of the LF.
• In an attempt to understand such disagreements, we present a comprehensive assessment of the uncertainties associated with the lensing models and the size distribution of galaxies.
• We use end-to-end simulations from the source plane to the final LF that account for all lensing effects and systematic uncertainties by comparing several mass models.