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The Frontier Fields are a directors discretionary time campaign with HST and the Spitzer Space Telescope to see deeper into the universe than ever before. The Frontier Fields combine the power of HST and Spitzer with the natural gravitational telescopes of massive high-magnification clusters of galaxies to produce the deepest observations of clusters and their lensed galaxies ever obtained. Six clusters - Abell 2744, MACSJ0416.1-2403, MACSJ0717.5+3745, MACSJ1149.5+2223, Abell S1063, and Abell 370 - were selected based on their lensing strength, sky darkness, Galactic extinction, parallel field suitability, accessibility to ground-based facilities, HST, Spitzer and JWST observability, and pre-existing ancillary data. These clusters have been targeted by the HST ACS/WFC and WFC3/IR with coordinated parallels of adjacent blank fields for over 840 HST orbits. The Spitzer Space Telescope has dedicated > 1000 hours of directors discretionary time to obtain IRAC 3.6 and 4.5 micron imaging to ~26.5, 26.0 ABmag 5-sigma point-source depths in the six cluster and six parallel Frontier Fields. The Frontier Field parallel fields are the second-deepest observations thus far by HST with ~29th ABmag 5-sigma point source depths in seven optical - near-infrared bandpasses. Galaxies behind the Frontier Field cluster lenses experience typical magnification factors of a few, with small regions near the critical curves magnified by factors 10-100. Therefore, the Frontier Field cluster HST images achieve intrinsic depths of ~30-33 magnitudes over very small volumes. Early studies of the Frontier Fields have probed galaxies fainter than any seen before during the epoch of reionization 6 < z < 10, mapped out the cluster dark matter to unprecedented resolution, and followed lensed transient events.
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In recent years, the rise in the number of Lyman Break Galaxies detected at high redshifts z >= 6 has opened up the possibility of understanding early galaxy formation physics in great detail. In particular, the faint-end slope (alpha) of the Ultra-violet luminosity function (UV LF) of these galaxies is a potential probe of feedback effects that suppress star formation in low mass haloes. In this work, we propose a proof-of-concept calculation for constraining the fluctuating UV background during reionization by constraining alpha in different volumes of the Universe. Because of patchy reionization, different volumes will experience different amount of photo-heating which should lead to a scatter in the measured alpha. Our approach is based on a simple model of the UV LF that is a scaled version of the halo mass function combined with an exponential suppression in the galaxy luminosity at the faint-end because of UV feedback. Although current data is not sufficient to constrain alpha in different fields, we expect that, in the near future, observations of the six lensed Hubble Frontier Fields with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will offer an ideal test of our concept.
We search for high-redshift dropout galaxies behind the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223, a powerful cosmic lens that has revealed a number of unique objects in its field. Using the deep images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, we find 11 galaxies at z>7 in the MACS J1149.5+2223 cluster field, and 11 in its parallel field. The high-redshift nature of the bright z~9.6 galaxy MACS1149-JD, previously reported by Zheng et al., is further supported by non-detection in the extremely deep optical images from the HFF campaign. With the new photometry, the best photometric redshift solution for MACS1149-JD reduces slightly to z=9.44 +/- 0.12. The young galaxy has an estimated stellar mass of (7 +/- 2)X10E8 Msun, and was formed at z=13.2 +1.9-1.6 when the universe was ~300 Myr old. Data available for the first four HFF clusters have already enabled us to find faint galaxies to an intrinsic magnitude of M(UV) ~ -15.5, approximately a factor of ten deeper than the parallel fields.
We map the lensing-inferred substructure in the first three clusters observed by the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields Initiative (HSTFF): Abell 2744 (z = 0.308), MACSJ0416, (z = 0.396) and MACSJ1149 (z = 0.543). Statistically resolving dark-matter subhaloes down to ~10^{9.5} solar masses, we compare the derived subhalo mass functions (SHMFs) to theoretical predictions from analytical models and with numerical simulations in a Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) cosmology. Mimicking our observational cluster member selection criteria in the HSTFF, we report excellent agreement in both amplitude and shape of the SHMF over four decades in subhalo mass (10^{9-13} solar masses). Projection effects do not appear to introduce significant errors in the determination of SHMFs from simulations. We do not find evidence for a substructure crisis, analogous to the missing satellite problem in the Local Group, on cluster scales, but rather excellent agreement of the count-matched HSTFF SHMF down to M_{sub halo}/M_{halo} ~ 10^{-5}. However, we do find discrepancies in the radial distribution of sub haloes inferred from HSTFF cluster lenses compared to determinations from simulated clusters. This suggests that although the selected simulated clusters match the HSTFF sample in mass, they do not adequately capture the dynamical properties and complex merging morphologies of these observed cluster lenses. Therefore, HSTFF clusters are likely observed in a transient evolutionary stage that is presently insufficiently sampled in cosmological simulations. The abundance and mass function of dark matter substructure in cluster lenses continues to offer an important test of the LCDM paradigm, and at present we find no tension between model predictions and observations.
We present a high-precision mass model of the galaxy cluster MACSJ1149.6+2223, based on a strong-gravitational-lensing analysis of Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields (HFF) imaging data and spectroscopic follow-up with Gemini/GMOS and VLT/MUSE. Our model includes 12 new multiply imaged galaxies, bringing the total to 22, comprised of 65 individual lensed images. Unlike the first two HFF clusters, Abell 2744 and MACSJ0416.1-2403, MACSJ1149 does not reveal as many multiple images in the HFF data. Using the Lenstool software package and the new sets of multiple images, we model the cluster with several cluster-scale dark-matter halos and additional galaxy-scale halos for the cluster members. Consistent with previous analyses, we find the system to be complex, composed of five cluster-scale halos. Their spatial distribution and lower mass, however, makes MACSJ1149 a less powerful lens. Our best-fit model predicts image positions with an RMS of 0.91. We measure the total projected mass inside a 200~kpc aperture as ($1.840pm 0.006$)$times 10^{14}$M$_{odot}$, thus reaching again 1% precision, following our previous HFF analyses of MACSJ0416.1-2403 and Abell 2744. In light of the discovery of the first resolved quadruply lensed supernova, SN Refsdal, in one of the multiply imaged galaxies identified in MACSJ1149, we use our revised mass model to investigate the time delays and predict the rise of the next image between November 2015 and January 2016.
We present a multi-band analysis of the six Hubble Frontier Field clusters and their parallel fields, producing catalogs with measurements of source photometry and photometric redshifts. We release these catalogs to the public along with maps of intracluster light and models for the brightest galaxies in each field. This rich data set covers a wavelength range from 0.2 to 8 $mu m$, utilizing data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Keck Observatories, Very Large Telescope array, and Spitzer Space Telescope. We validate our products by injecting into our fields and recovering a population of synthetic objects with similar characteristics as in real extragalactic surveys. The photometric catalogs contain a total of over 32,000 entries with 50% completeness at a threshold of $mathrm{mag_{AB}}sim 29.1$ for unblended sources, and $mathrm{mag_{AB}}sim 29$ for blended ones, in the IR-Weighted detection band. Photometric redshifts were obtained by means of template fitting and have an average outlier fraction of 10.3% and scatter $sigma = 0.067$ when compared to spectroscopic estimates. The software we devised, after being tested in the present work, will be applied to new data sets from ongoing and future surveys.
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