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v3.3.5
Speakers: Giorgia Girardi (Università degli Studi di Padova)
With the advent of JWST, we can probe the rest-frame optical emission of galaxies at z > 3 with high sensitivity and spatial
resolution, making it possible to accurately characterize red, optically faint galaxies and thus mov e towards a more complete
census of the galaxy population at high redshifts. To this end, we present a sample of 148 massive, dusty galaxies from the
JWST/Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science surv ey, colour-selected using solely JWST bands. With deep JWST/NIRCam
data from 1.15 to 4.44 μm and ancillary HST/ACS and WFC3 data, we determine the physical properties of our sample
using spectral energy distribution fitting with BAGPIPES. We demonstrate that our selection method efficiently identifies massive
(⟨log M⋆/M⊙⟩ ∼ 10) and dusty (⟨AV⟩ ∼ 2.7 mag) sources, with a majority at z > 3 and predominantly lying on the galaxy
main sequence. The main results of this work are the stellar mass functions (SMFs) of red, optically faint galaxies from redshifts
between 3 < z < 8: these galaxies make up a significant relative fraction of the pre-JWST total SMF at 3 < z < 4 and
4 < z < 6, and dominate the high-mass end of the pre-JWST SMF at 6 < z < 8, suggesting that our census of the galaxy
population needs amendment at these epochs. While larger areas need to be surve yed in the future, our results suggest already that
the integrated stellar mass density at log M⋆/M⊙ ≥ 9.25 may have been underestimated in pre-JWST studies by up to ∼15–20%
at z ∼ 3–6, and up to ∼45% at z ∼ 6–8, indicating the rapid onset of obscured stellar mass assembly in the early Universe.