Papers › Beyond UVJ: Color Selection of Galaxies in the JWST Era
Beyond UVJ: Color Selection of Galaxies in the JWST Era
Jacqueline Antwi-Danso, Casey Papovich, Joel Leja, Danilo Marchesini, Z. Cemile Marsan, Nicholas S. Martis, Ivo Labbé, Adam Muzzin, Karl Glazebrook, Caroline M. S. Straatman, Kim-Vy H. Tran
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We present a new rest-frame color-color selection method using "synthetic uₛ-gₛ and gₛ-iₛ'', (ugi)ₛ colors to identify star-forming and quiescent galaxies. Our method is similar to the widely-used U-V versus V-J (UVJ) diagram. However, UVJ suffers known systematics. Spectroscopic campaigns have shown that UVJ-selected quiescent samples at z ≳3 include ∼10-30% contamination from galaxies with dust-obscured star formation and strong emission lines. Moreover, at z>3, UVJ colors are extrapolated because the rest-frame J-band shifts beyond the coverage of the deepest bandpasses at < 5 μm (typically Spitzer/IRAC 4.5 μm or future JWST/NIRCam observations). We demonstrate that (ugi)ₛ offers improvements to UVJ at z>3, and can be applied to galaxies in the JWST era. We apply (ugi)ₛ selection to galaxies at 0.5<z<6 from the (observed) 3D-HST and UltraVISTA catalogs, and to the (simulated) JAGUAR catalogs. We show that extrapolation can affect (V-J)₀ color by up to 1 magnitude, but changes (uₛ-gₛ)₀ color by ≤ 0.2 mag, even at z≃6. While (ugi)ₛ-selected quiescent samples are comparable to UVJ in completeness (both achieve ∼85-90% at z=3-3.5), (ugi)ₛ reduces contamination in quiescent samples by nearly a factor of two, from ≃35% to ≃17% at z=3, and from ≃60% to ≃33% at z=6. This leads to improvements in the true-to-false-positive ratio (TP/FP), where we find TP/FP ≳ 2.2 for (ugi)ₛ at z ≃3.5 - 6, compared to TP/FP < 1 for UVJ-selected samples. This indicates that contaminants will outnumber true quiescent galaxies in UVJ at these redshifts, while (ugi)ₛ will provide higher-fidelity samples.
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