UV Spectral-Slopes at $z=6-9$ in the Hubble Frontier Fields: Lack of Evidence for Unusual or Pop III Stellar Populations

Abstract

We present new measurements of the UV spectral slope $\beta$ for galaxies at $z=6-9$ in the Frontier Fields cluster MACSJ0416.1-2403 and its parallel field, to an unprecedented level of low stellar mass. We fit synthetic stellar population models to the observed spectral energy distribution and calculate $\beta$ by fitting a power law to the best-fit spectrum. With this method, we report the derivation of rest-frame UV colours of galaxies for the Frontier Fields program extending out to $z=9$, probing magnitudes as faint as $M{}_{\mathrm{UV}}=-13.5$ at $z=6$. We find no significant correlation between $\beta$ and rest-frame UV magnitude $M_{1500}$ all redshifts, but we do find a strong correlation between $\beta$ and stellar mass with lower mass galaxies exhibiting bluer UV slopes. At $z=7$ the bluest median value of our sample is redder than previously reported values in the literature, whereas at $z=9$ our bluest data point has a median value of $\beta =-2.63_{-0.43}^{+0.52}$. Thus, we find no evidence for extreme stellar populations at $z>6$. We also observe a strong correlation between $\beta$ and SFR, such that galaxies with low SFRs exhibit bluer slopes. Additionally, there exists a star formation main sequence up to $z=9$ with SFRs correlating with stellar mass. All of these relations show that $\beta$ values correlate with a process that drives both the overall SFR and stellar mass assembly. Furthermore, we observe no trend between $\beta$ and specific SFR, suggesting that $\beta$ is getting set by a global process driven by the scale of the galaxy.

21 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ

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