Extremely Small Sizes for Faint z~2-8 Galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields: A Key Input For Establishing their Volume Density and UV Emissivity

TL;DR

This study provides the first observational constraints on the extremely small sizes of faint high-redshift galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields, which impacts estimates of their abundance and role in cosmic reionization.

Contribution

The paper introduces two novel techniques to measure the sizes of the faintest galaxies at z~2-8, revealing they are much smaller than previously assumed.

Findings

Faint galaxies have half-light radii less than ~30 mas, likely 5-10 mas.

No correlation between galaxy surface density and shear, indicating very small sizes.

Results imply lower volume densities and shallower faint-end slopes for faint galaxies.

Abstract

We provide the first observational constraints on the sizes of the faintest galaxies lensed by the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) clusters. Ionizing radiation from faint galaxies likely drives cosmic reionization, and the HFF initiative provides a key opportunity to find such galaxies. Yet, we cannot really assess their ionizing emissivity without a robust measurement of their sizes, since this is key to quantifying both their prevalence and the faint-end slope to the UV luminosity function. Here we provide the first such size constraints with 2 new techniques. The first utilizes the fact that the detectability of highly-magnified galaxies as a function of shear is very dependent on a galaxy's size. Only the most compact galaxies will remain detectable in regions of high shear (vs. a larger detectable size range for low shear), a phenomenon we carefully quantify using simulations. Remarkably, however, no correlation is found between the surface density of faint galaxies and the predicted shear, using 87 faint high-magnification mu>10 z~2-8 galaxies seen behind the first 4 HFF clusters. This can only be the case if such faint (~-15 mag) galaxies have significantly smaller sizes than luminous galaxies. We constrain their half-light radii to be <~30 mas (<160-240 pc). As a 2nd size probe, we rotate and stack 26 faint high-magnification sources along the major shear axis. Less elongation is found than even for objects with an intrinsic half-light radius of 10 mas. Together these results indicate that extremely faint z~2-8 galaxies have near point-source profiles in the HFF dataset (half-light radii conservatively <30 mas and likely 5-10 mas). These results suggest smaller completeness corrections and hence much lower volume densities for faint z~2-8 galaxies and shallower faint-end slopes than have been derived in many recent studies (by factors of ~2-3 and by dalpha>~0.1-0.3).