{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/beyond-uvj-color-selection-of-galaxies-in-the","title":"Beyond UVJ: Color Selection of Galaxies in the JWST Era","arxiv_id":"2207.07170","date":"2022-07-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["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"],"abstract":"We present a new rest-frame color-color selection method using \"synthetic $u_s-g_s$ and $g_s-i_s$'', $(ugi)_s$ 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 $z \\gtrsim 3$ include $\\sim 10-30\\%$ 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 $< 5~\\mu m$ (typically $Spitzer$/IRAC 4.5 $\\mu m$ 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 $(u_s-g_s)_0$ color by $\\leq$ 0.2 mag, even at $z\\simeq 6$. While $(ugi)_s$-selected quiescent samples are comparable to $UVJ$ in completeness (both achieve $\\sim$85-90% at $z=3-3.5$), $(ugi)_s$ reduces contamination in quiescent samples by nearly a factor of two, from $\\simeq$35% to $\\simeq$17% at $z=3$, and from $\\simeq $60% to $\\simeq $33% at $z=6$. This leads to improvements in the true-to-false-positive ratio (TP/FP), where we find TP/FP $\\gtrsim$ 2.2 for $(ugi)_s$ at $z \\simeq 3.5 - 6$, 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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07170v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.07170v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"beyond-uvj-color-selection-of-galaxies-in-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/jacqdanso/synthetic-ugi-filters","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}