THE EFFECT OF SURFACE BRIGHTNESS DIMMING IN THE SELECTION OF HIGH-zGALAXIES

Cosmological surface brightness (SB) dimming of the form (1 + z)−4 affects all sources. The strong dependence of SB dimming on redshift z suggests the presence of a selection bias when searching for high-z galaxies, i.e., we tend to detect only those galaxies with a high SB. However, unresolved knots of emission are not affected by SB dimming, thus providing a way to test the clumpiness of high-z galaxies. Our strategy relies on the comparison of the total flux detected for the same source in surveys characterized by different depth. For all galaxies, deeper images permit the better investigation of low-SB features. Cosmological SB dimming makes these low-SB features hard to detect when going to higher and higher redshifts.We used the GOODS and HUDF Hubble Space Telescope legacy data sets to study the effect of SB dimming on low-SB features of high-z galaxies and compare it to the prediction for smooth sources. We selected a sample of Lyman-break galaxies at z ∼ 4 (i.e., B435-band dropouts) detected in all of the data sets and found no significant trend when comparing the total magnitudes measured from images with different depth. Through Monte Carlo simulations we derived the expected trend for galaxies with different SB profiles. The comparison to the data hints at a compact distribution for most of the rest-frame ultraviolet light emitted from high-z galaxies.