The UNCOVER Survey: A First-look HST+JWST Catalog of Galaxy Redshifts and Stellar Population Properties Spanning $0.2 \lesssim z \lesssim 15$

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of galaxy redshifts and stellar properties from the UNCOVER survey using JWST and HST data, covering a wide redshift range up to 15, and demonstrates the effectiveness of Bayesian photometric fitting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Bayesian approach for deriving galaxy properties and redshifts from JWST data, and publicly releases a detailed galaxy catalog spanning $0.2$ to $15$ redshift.

Findings

Achieved photometric redshift accuracy with $\sigma_{ m NMAD} \\sim 0.03$

Provided the deepest view of the universe to date using gravitational lensing

Released a comprehensive galaxy property catalog for community use

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 $z \sim 15$. We show the redshift evolution of stellar ages, star formation rates, and rest-frame colors across the full range of $0.2 \lesssim z \lesssim 15$. The galaxy properties are inferred using the Prospector Bayesian inference framework using informative Prospector-$\beta$ priors on masses and star formation histories to produce joint redshift and stellar population 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 $\sigma_{\rm NMAD} \sim 0.03$, of a similar quality to the established photometric redshift code EAzY. In line with the open-source scientific objective of the Treasury survey, we publicly release the stellar population 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.