COSMOS-Web: An Overview of the JWST Cosmic Origins Survey

We propose the COSMOS-Web Survey, an ambitious treasury program to map a contiguous 0.6 deg^2 area with deep NIRCam imaging in 4 filters and a 0.2 deg^2 deep MIRI survey in parallel. COSMOS-Web will accomplish the following science goals that simply cannot be done with any other existing or currently planned survey:

I) revolutionize our understanding of reionization's spatial distribution, environments, and drivers at early stages by pioneering the detection of thousands of galaxies in the epoch of reionization (EoR, z=6-11),

II) identify hundreds of the rarest quiescent galaxies in the first 2 Gyr (z > 4) to place stringent constraints on the formation of the Universe’s most massive (M*>10^10Msun) galaxies, and

III) directly measure the evolution of the stellar mass to halo mass relation (SMHR) out to z~2.5 and its variance with galaxies' star formation histories and morphologies.

COSMOS-Web is designed to leave no stone unturned for deep, wide extragalactic surveys – eliminating cosmic variance and resulting in an order of magnitude more early Universe galaxies than all other Hubble+Webb surveys combined, thus significantly constraining the shape of the bright end of the UV luminosity function and mapping the early cosmic web. It will be the primary legacy dataset from Webb for the extragalactic community by providing quick public releases of multi-band, high-resolution near-IR imaging of half a million galaxies (and an unprecedented 32,000 in the mid?IR) thus enabling innumerable legacy science projects.

Conducting this next level ambitious survey now is crucial given the finite lifetime of Webb and the need to plan swift follow-up of its unique discoveries.

CWEBTILE-4-2

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope MAST Portal. Release date: 2023-04-10

Camera: NIRCAM

Color Mapped:

Red - F444W
Green - F277W
Cyan - F150W
Blue- F115W

Processed with FITS Liberator, PixInsight and Photoshop 2023.