James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

The UNCOVER Survey: A First-Look HST+JWST Catalog of Galaxy Redshifts and Stellar Populations Properties Spanning 0.2<=z<=15

An example from the UNCOVER field. The upper left shows the SED of the galaxy. The observed photometry is plotted as black dots, while the maximum-likelihood photometry and spectrum are shown in red. The lower left shows the inferred SFH of the galaxy. The x-axis is the lookback time in Gyr, ans the y-axis is the SFR in M? yr-1. The RGB color composite is made from F444W, F277W, and F115W bands. The lower right is a corner plot showing the marginal and joint posterior distributions of redshift, stellar mass, stellar metallicity, star formation rate, mass-weighted age, and optical depth of the diffuse dust. Abstract: The recent UNCOVER survey with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) exploits the nearby cluster Abell 2744 to create the deepest view of our universe to date by leveraging strong gravitational lensing. In this work, we perform photometric fitting of more than 50,000 robustly detected sources out to z~15. We show the redshift evolution of stellar ages, star formation rates, and rest-frame colors across the full range of 0.2?z?15. The galaxy properties are inferred using the \texttt{Prospector} Bayesian inference framework using informative \texttt{Prospector}-ß priors on masses and star formation histories to produce joint redshift and stellar populations posteriors, and additionally lensing magnification is performed on-the-fly to ensure consistency with the scale-dependent priors. We show that this approach produces excellent photometric redshifts with sNMAD~0.03, of a similar quality to the established photometric redshift code \texttt{EAzY}. In line with the open-source scientific objective of the Treasury survey, we publicly release the stellar populations catalog with this paper, derived from the photometric catalog adapting aperture sizes based on source profiles. This release includes posterior moments, maximum-likelihood spectra, star-formation histories, and full posterior distributions, offering a rich data set to explore the processes governing galaxy formation and evolution over a parameter space now accessible by JWST.