A Morphology Catalog of Galaxies in CEERS: Evolution in the Size and Color Gradients of Galaxies Since Cosmic Dawn

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive catalog of galaxy morphologies in the CEERS survey, analyzing size, structure, and color gradients of thousands of galaxies up to redshift 9, revealing evolutionary patterns and stellar population distributions.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive morphological catalog in the CEERS field with detailed measurements across multiple filters, enabling new insights into galaxy evolution since cosmic dawn.

Findings

Galaxy sizes agree with previous HST measurements within 0.09 dex.

Size-mass relation evolution is consistent with lower redshift studies.

Color gradients depend on galaxy type and mass, with no significant redshift evolution.

Abstract

We present measurements of morphological parameters from fitting 53,885 galaxies detected to a magnitude limit of F356W$< 28.5$ in the CEERS NIRCam imaging with galfit in six broadband filters: F115W, F150W, F200W, F277W, F356W, and F444W. We provide a public catalog of S\'ersic index, effective semi-major axis, axis ratio, integrated magnitude, and position angle for these galaxies in each of the filters. Uncertainties in the measured parameters are estimated from simulated galaxies that have similar noise and background properties as the observed galaxies. We compare our measurements with those in the CANDELS/EGS field measured with HST/WFC3 and find that the sizes agree to within 0.09 dex and the S\'ersic indices agree to within 0.13 dex. We further present the evolution in the size-mass relation, and find that the evolution to $z\sim9$ is consistent with previous results derived at lower redshift. Finally, we look at the color gradients of galaxies at $1<z<5$ and find that for late-type galaxies ($n<2.5$), there is a strong dependence on mass, but no apparent evolution with redshift, indicating that the stellar populations and dust attenuation in more massive galaxies vary substantially with radius and contribute to significant morphological $k-$corrections. For early type galaxies ($n>2.5$), the color gradients are nearly flat with no dependence on mass, indicating that the stellar populations are more uniform throughout. The structural measurements presented are accurate to $20\%$ or better for most galaxies with F356W $<27.0$ mag and will enable further studies of galaxy morphology to $z\sim10$.