The JWST North Ecliptic Pole Time Domain Field (NEP-TDF): Results from the First-Year of JWST data

[Poster presented at The First Year of JWST Science Conference at STScI (Baltimore, MD) -- September 11-14, 2023]

Abstract: The JWST North Ecliptic Pole Time Domain Field (NEP-TDF) is located within JWST's northern Continuous Viewing Zone and spans ~14 arcmin in diameter (Jansen & Windhorst 2018). This is the only region in the sky where JWST can observe a clean extragalactic deep survey field (free of bright foreground stars and with low Galactic foreground extinction A_V) at arbitrary cadence or at arbitrary orientation. This will crucially enable a wide range of new and exciting time-domain science, including high redshift transient searches and monitoring (e.g., SNe), variability studies from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), as well as proper motions of extremely scattered Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud Objects, and of nearby Galactic brown dwarfs, low-mass stars, and ultracool white dwarfs. This field has a wealth of deep ground- and space-based ancillary data from X-rays through radio. Deep UV-Visible HST imaging to m_AB~29 mag exists covering almost the entire field which will enable a wealth of additional galaxy evolution science, especially when coupled with all the other multi-wavelength data.

The JWST ``Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science'' ('PEARLS') GTO program (Windhorst+ 2023) has observed the NEP-TDF with eight NIRCam imaging filters (F090W, F115W, F150W, F200W, F277W, F356W, F410M, and F444W) and NIRISS grism spectroscopic mode. This field consists of two sets of partially overlapping pairs of NIRCam pointings, with each pair of NIRCam pointings referred to as a ‘spoke’. This results in four NIRCam spokes with a total area of 13.67 arcmin^2 per spoke, and a total area for the four NEP-TDF epochs of 54.79 arcmin^2. As a GTO survey, PEARLS has proprietary time on its data, but the observations from the first spoke in the NEP TDF are public. This poster presents our main PEARLS NEP-TDF results obtained thus far, including the properties of radio sources and the search for high redshift galaxies and AGN in this field.