Demonstrating the negligible contribution of optical ACS/HST galaxies to source-subtracted cosmic infrared background fluctuations in deep IRAC/Spitzer images

TL;DR

This study shows that optical galaxies detected by Hubble ACS do not significantly contribute to the large-scale cosmic infrared background fluctuations observed in deep Spitzer IRAC images, implying these fluctuations originate from higher redshift sources or very faint local galaxies.

Contribution

It provides evidence that optical ACS galaxies are negligible contributors to the large-scale CIB fluctuations, refining the understanding of their origin.

Findings

ACS galaxies have minimal correlation with residual Spitzer CIB fluctuations.

Residual CIB fluctuations are inconsistent with contributions from ACS-detected galaxies.

CIB fluctuations likely originate from sources at redshift z > 7.5 or extremely faint local galaxies.

Abstract

We study the possible contribution of optical galaxies detected with the {\it Hubble} ACS instrument to the near-IR cosmic infrared (CIB) fluctuations in deep {\it Spitzer} images. The {\it Spitzer} data used in this analysis are obtained in the course of the GOODS project from which we select four independent $10^\prime\times10^\prime$ regions observed at both 3.6 and 4.5 \um. ACS source catalogs for all of these areas are used to construct maps containing only their emissions in the ACS $B, V, i, z$-bands. We find that deep Spitzer data exhibit CIB fluctuations remaining after removal of foreground galaxies of a very different clustering pattern at both 3.6 and 4.5 \um than the ACS galaxies could contribute. We also find that there are very good correlations between the ACS galaxies and the {\it removed} galaxies in the Spitzer maps, but practically no correlations remain with the residual Spitzer maps used to identify the CIB fluctuations. These contributions become negligible on larger scales used to probe the CIB fluctuations arising from clustering. This means that the ACS galaxies cannot contribute to the large-scale CIB fluctuations found in the residual Spitzer data. The absence of their contributions also means that the CIB fluctuations arise at $z\gsim 7.5$ as the Lyman break of their sources must be redshifted past the longest ACS band, or the fluctuations have to originate in the more local but extremely low luminosity galaxies.