The Taiwan ECDFS Near-Infrared Survey: Very Bright End of the Luminosity
  Function at z>7
  The primary goal of the Taiwan ECDFS Near-Infrared Survey (TENIS) is to find
well screened galaxy candidates at z>7 (z' dropout) in the Extended Chandra
Deep Field-South (ECDFS). To this end, TENIS provides relatively deep J and Ks
data (~25.3 ABmag, 5-sigma) for an area of 0.5*0.5 degree. Leveraged with
existing data at mid-infrared to optical wavelengths, this allows us to screen
for the most luminous high-z objects, which are rare and thus require a survey
over a large field to be found. We introduce new color selection criteria to
select a z>7 sample with minimal contaminations from low-z galaxies and
Galactic cool stars; to reduce confusion in the relatively low angular
resolution IRAC images, we introduce a novel deconvolution method to measure
the IRAC fluxes of individual sources. Illustrating perhaps the effectiveness
at which we screen out interlopers, we find only one z>7 candidate, TENIS-ZD1.
The candidate has a weighted z_phot of 7.8, and its colors and luminosity
indicate a young (45M years old) starburst galaxy with a stellar mass of
3.2*10^10 M_sun. The result matches with the observational luminosity function
analysis and the semi-analytic simulation result based on the Millennium
Simulations, which may over predict the volume density for high-z massive
galaxies. The existence of TENIS-ZD1, if confirmed spectroscopically to be at
z>7, therefore poses a challenge to current theoretical models for how so much
mass can accumulate in a galaxy at such a high redshift.
