Assigned ID: 429 ----- Attempting Submission 1 (Fri Feb 26 17:11:45 GMT 2010) ----- HST Phase I Proposal 429 (Cycle18_AR.apt) successfully submitted. ----- Attempting Submission 2 (Fri Feb 26 21:42:02 GMT 2010) ----- We request archival funds to complete a robust study of galaxies in the z > 7 Universe using a new set of unprecedentedly deep data from HST WFC3/IR. These data probe an epoch when the Universe was only 500 - 800 Myr old, placing constraints on the earliest phases of galaxy formation. We recently completed a thorough study of the HUDF with WFC3. Using robust analysis techniques to study the stellar populations in these galaxies, we improved upon early release papers to provide a valuable analysis to the community. We will continue this work, combining the HUDF, HUDF-01 and HUDF-02 datasets to compile a sample ~ 3X larger. We will search for galaxies at z = 7 - 9 within this dataset by computing photometric redshifts, which offers a smaller redshift uncertainty than typical Lyman break color-criteria selection, as well as allowing a more complete census of the galaxy population at z > 7. We will run bootstrap Monte Carlo simulations on our sample, which place strong constraints on the presence of primordial stellar populations in these galaxies - this is more physically accurate than other studies, which have only reported the standard error on the mean, which does not give information on how well one can rule out certain scenarios. Lastly, we will fit the full spectral energy distributions of these objects to a suite of stellar population models, computing confidence ranges on each property. As we found in our previous work, although the age and dust are difficult to constrain, the stellar mass is well constrained with only rest-UV detections due to the old age of the Universe. A 3X increase in sample size nearly doubles the accuracy with which we can pin down the stellar populations in these galaxies. At such high redshifts, large samples of galaxies are expensive and extremely hard to come by. The opportunity to examine a sample of ~ 100 z > 7 galaxies is a unique one, and by applying our robust techniques, we will present the most complete analysis of the galaxy population in the young universe.

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