DAWN JWST Archive: Morphology from profile fitting of over 340 000 galaxies in major fields

Abstract

To better understand how galaxies assemble their structure and evolve over cosmic time, we present a new catalog of morphological measurements for over 340,000 sources spanning $0<z<12$, derived from deep JWST NIRCam imaging across four major extragalactic fields (CEERS, PRIMER-UDS, PRIMER-COSMOS, GOODS) compiled in the DAWN JWST Archive (DJA). We perform two-dimensional surface brightness fitting for all galaxies in a uniform, flux-limited sample. Each galaxy is modeled with both a Sérsic profile and a two-component (bulge and disk) decomposition, yielding consistent structural parameters - including effective radius, Sérsic index, axis ratio, and bulge-to-total ratio ($B/T$). To demonstrate the scientific application of our morphology catalogs, we combined these measurements with DJA photometric redshifts, physical parameters and rest-frame colors, and investigated the relation between total, bulge and disk sizes, Sérsic index ($n_S$), star formation activity, and redshift. Bulge-dominated galaxies (high $n_S$ and $B/T$) predominantly occupy the quiescent region of the $UVJ$ diagram, while disk-dominated galaxies are mostly star-forming. A significant bimodality persists, with quiescent disks and compact, bulge-dominated star-forming galaxies observed out to $z>3$. Quiescent galaxies also show significantly higher stellar mass surface densities, nearly an order of magnitude greater at $z\sim 4$ than at $z\sim 1$. Our results confirm a strong and evolving link between morphology and star formation activity, and support a scenario in which bulge growth and quenching are closely connected. This work is a highly valuable addition to the DJA, adding a morphological dimension to this rich dataset and thus enabling a wider scientific application.

arXiv comment12 pages, 9 figures; published in A&A

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