Description
We study the evolution of galaxy rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) colors in the epoch 4<~z<~8. We use new wide-field near-infrared data in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-South field from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) 2009, and Early Release Science programs to select galaxies via photometric redshift measurements. Our sample consists of 2812 candidate galaxies at z>~3.5, including 113 at z=~7-8. We fit the observed spectral energy distribution to a suite of synthetic stellar population models and measure the value of the UV spectral slope ({beta}) from the best-fit model spectrum. We run simulations to show that this measurement technique results in a smaller scatter on {beta} than other methods, as well as a reduced number of galaxies with catastrophically incorrect {beta} measurements (i.e., {Delta}{beta}>1).
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