http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.00731
The study of the extragalactic background light (EBL) in the optical and near infrared has received a lot of attention in the last decade, especially near a wavelength of $\lambda\approx 3.4\,\mathrm{\mu m}$, with remaining tension among different techniques for estimating the background. In this paper we present a measurement of the contribution of galaxies to the EBL at $3.4\,\mathrm{\mu m}$ that is based on the measurement of the luminosity function (LF) in Lake et al. (2018) and the mean spectral energy distribution of galaxies in Lake & Wright (2016). The mean and standard deviation of our most reliable Bayesian posterior chain gives a $3.4\,\mathrm{\mu m}$ background of $I_\nu = 9.0\pm0.5 \,\mathrm{kJy} \,\mathrm{sr}^{-1}$ $(\nu I_\nu = 8.0\pm0.4 \,\mathrm{nW} \,\mathrm{m}^{-2} \,\mathrm{sr}^{-1})$, with systematic uncertainties unlikely to be greater than $2\,\mathrm{kJy} \,\mathrm{sr}^{-1}$. This result is higher than most previous efforts to measure the contribution of galaxies to the $3.4\,\mathrm{\mu m}$ EBL, but is consistent with the upper limits placed by blazars and the most recent direct measurements of the total $3.4\,\mathrm{\mu m}$ EBL.
S. Lake, E. Wright, R. Assef, et. al.
Mon, 5 Aug 19
8/53
Comments: 14 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to ApJ. Table 1 data to be available from figshare under DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.4245443, Table 2 under DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.8142284, and the data behind Figure 5 under 10.6084/m9.figshare.4757131