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  • RELICS: The Reionization Le...
    Salmon, Brett; Coe, Dan; Bradley, Larry; Bouwens, Rychard; Brada, Marusa; Huang, Kuang-Han; Oesch, Pascal A.; Stark, Daniel; Sharon, Keren; Trenti, Michele; Avila, Roberto J.; Ogaz, Sara; Andrade-Santos, Felipe; Carrasco, Daniela; Cerny, Catherine; Dawson, William; Frye, Brenda L.; Hoag, Austin; Johnson, Traci Lin; Jones, Christine; Lam, Daniel; Lovisari, Lorenzo; Mainali, Ramesh; Past, Matt; Paterno-Mahler, Rachel; Peterson, Avery; Riess, Adam G.; Rodney, Steven A.; Ryan, Russel E.; Sendra-Server, Irene; Strait, Victoria; Strolger, Louis-Gregory; Umetsu, Keiichi; Vulcani, Benedetta; Zitrin, Adi

    Astrophysical journal/˜The œAstrophysical journal, 02/2020, Volume: 889, Issue: 2
    Journal Article

    Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations. We present here the candidate high-redshift galaxies from the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS), a Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 41 massive galaxy clusters spanning an area of 200 arcmin2. These clusters were selected to be excellent lenses, and we find similar high-redshift sample sizes and magnitude distributions as the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH). We discover 257, 57, and eight candidate galaxies at z ∼ 6, 7, and 8 respectively, (322 in total). The observed (lensed) magnitudes of the z ∼ 6 candidates are as bright as AB mag ∼23, making them among the brightest known at these redshifts, comparable with discoveries from much wider, blank-field surveys. RELICS demonstrates the efficiency of using strong gravitational lenses to produce high-redshift samples in the epoch of reionization. These brightly observed galaxies are excellent targets for follow-up study with current and future observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope.