Everything Every Band All at Once I: A Global Morphology Catalog in Abell 2744 based on UNCOVER/MegaScience

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of structural galaxy parameters in Abell 2744 derived from JWST imaging, enabling wide-ranging studies of galaxy morphology across redshifts 0.3 to 8.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, high-quality structural parameter catalog for galaxies in Abell 2744 using JWST data, with robust measurements and community access.

Findings

Achieved fractional error < 20% for SNR > 10 measurements.

Catalog covers galaxies with sizes from 100 pc to 10 kpc across redshifts 0.3 to 8.

Demonstrated the utility of the catalog for diverse galaxy morphology studies.

Abstract

We present spectrally-resolved structural parameter measurements of 29,608 sources from the legacy lensing field of Abell 2744, quantifying global structures from observed $0.7 \mu m - 4.8 \mu m$ and spanning rest-frame UV to NIR at $R\sim15$. These measurements are made on imaging mosaics mainly from the UNCOVER/MegaScience survey, including 20 JWST NIRCam broad and medium bands. We perform single-component S\'ersic fitting to these galaxies using \texttt{pysersic}, a Bayesian structural fitting tool, to infer their structural parameters and associated random uncertainties from the posterior distributions. Through various quality evaluation criteria, we infer robust structural parameters among $> 90\%$ of the selected $\rm SNR>10$ sources. For each galaxy with reliable sizes in at least two bands and a high-quality redshift, we fit its observed size as a function of wavelength and infer rest-frame UV, optical, and near-infrared sizes where applicable. By performing injection-recovery tests on simulated galaxy cutouts in selected bands, we establish that our structural parameter measurements achieve fractional error $< 10 -20\%$ above $\rm SNR>10$. With this paper, all raw structural measurements and fitted rest-frame sizes are quality-flagged, cataloged, and released to the community. Finally, we demonstrate that this catalog enables the structural study of galaxies over an unprecedentedly wide parameter space of redshift ($0.3<z<8$), stellar mass ($\rm 10^{7}\, M_{\odot}<M_{*} <10^{11.5}\, M_{\odot}$), and rest-frame optical size ($\rm 100 \,pc<R_{e}<10\,kpc$), after correcting for lensing magnification.