2023/07/14 by Haojing Yan, Yan, Haojing, Zhiyuan Ma +48 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.07579
openalex publication_date 2023/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With its unprecedented sensitivity and spatial resolution, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened a new window for time-domain discoveries in the infrared. Here we report observations in the only field that has received four epochs (spanning 126 days) of JWST NIRCam observations in Cycle 1. This field is towards MACS J0416.1-2403, which is a rich galaxy cluster at redshift z=0.4 and is one of the Hubble Frontier Fields. We have discovered 14 transients from these data. Twelve of these transients happened in three galaxies (with z=0.94, 1.01, and 2.091) crossing a lensing caustic of the cluster,and these transients are highly magnified by gravitational lensing. These 12 transients are likely of similar nature to those previously reported based on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data in this field, i.e., individual stars in the highly magnified arcs. However, these twelve could not have been found by HST because they are too red and too faint. The other two transients are associated with background galaxies (z=2.205 and 0.7093) that are only moderately magnified, and they are likely supernovae. They indicate a de-magnified supernova surface density, when monitored at a time cadence of a few months to a ~3--4 micron survey limit of AB ~ 28.5 mag, of ~0.5 per sq. arcmin integrated to z ~ 2. This survey depth is beyond the capability of HST but can be easily reached by JWST.