The Impact of Dust on the Sizes of Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to analyze galaxy sizes during the Epoch of Reionization, revealing dust's significant role in observed size-luminosity relations and their evolution with redshift.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how dust affects galaxy size measurements and the evolution of galaxy sizes from z=7 to 11 using a large simulated galaxy sample.

Findings

Dust causes larger measured sizes in dust-attenuated images.

Galaxy sizes decrease with redshift following R∝(1+z)^-0.662.

Intrinsic sizes of quasar hosts are small, but appear larger when dust effects are included.

Abstract

We study the sizes of galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization using a sample of ~100,000 galaxies from the BlueTides cosmological hydrodynamical simulation from z=7 to 11. We measure the galaxy sizes from stellar mass and luminosity maps, defining the effective radius as the minimum radius which could enclose the pixels containing 50% of the total mass/light in the image. We find an inverse relationship between stellar mass and effective half-mass radius, suggesting that the most massive galaxies are more compact and dense than lower mass galaxies, which have flatter mass distributions. We find a mildly negative relation between intrinsic far-ultraviolet luminosity and size, while we find a positive size-luminosity relation when measured from dust-attenuated images. This suggests that dust is the predominant cause of the observed positive size-luminosity relation, with dust preferentially attenuating bright sight lines resulting in a flatter emission profile and thus larger measured effective radii. We study the size-luminosity relation across the rest-frame ultraviolet and optical, and find that the slope decreases at longer wavelengths; this is a consequence of the relation being caused by dust, which produces less attenuation at longer wavelengths. We find that the far-ultraviolet size-luminosity relation shows mild evolution from z=7 to 11, and galaxy size evolves with redshift as $R\propto(1+z)^{-m}$, where $m=0.662\pm0.009$. Finally, we investigate the sizes of z=7 quasar host galaxies, and find that while the intrinsic sizes of quasar hosts are small relative to the overall galaxy sample, they have comparable sizes when measured from dust-attenuated images.