Paper

A Morphology Catalog of Galaxies in CEERS: Evolution in the Size and Color Gradients of Galaxies Since Cosmic Dawn

Wilkins, Stephen M, Finkelstein, Steven L, Wang, Xin, Cox, Isa G, Costantin, Luca, Pirzkal, Nor, McGrath, Elizabeth J, Holwerda, Benne W, Lotz, Jennifer M, Trump, Jonathan R, Lise-Marie Seillé, Dickinson, Mark, Kirkpatrick, Allison, Calabrò, Antonello, Ravindranath, Swara, Somerville, Rachel S, Mobasher, Bahram, Barro, Guillermo, Buitrago, Fernando, Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S, Hirschmann, Michaela, Koekemoer, Anton M, Fontana, Adriano, Amorín, Ricardo O, Davis, Kelcey, Grazian, Andrea, Bagley, Micaela B, Grogin, Norman A, Hathi, Nimish P, Pacucci, Fabio, Kocevski, Dale D, Backhaus, Bren E, Yung, L Y Aaron, Pablo Arrabal Haro, Huertas-Company, Marc, Gandolfi, Giovanni, Yang, Guang, Pentericci, Laura, Lucas, Ray A, Papovich, Casey, Kewley, Lisa J, Guo, Yuchen, Cheng, Yingjie, Pérez-González, Pablo G, Pandya, Viraj

2026

Overview

We present measurements of morphological parameters from fitting 53,885 galaxies detected to a magnitude limit of F356W\\(< 28.5\\) in the CEERS NIRCam imaging with galfit in six broadband filters: F115W, F150W, F200W, F277W, F356W, and F444W. We provide a public catalog of Sérsic index, effective semi-major axis, axis ratio, integrated magnitude, and position angle for these galaxies in each of the filters. Uncertainties in the measured parameters are estimated from simulated galaxies that have similar noise and background properties as the observed galaxies. We compare our measurements with those in the CANDELS/EGS field measured with HST/WFC3 and find that the sizes agree to within 0.09 dex and the Sérsic indices agree to within 0.13 dex. We further present the evolution in the size-mass relation, and find that the evolution to \\(z9\\) is consistent with previous results derived at lower redshift. Finally, we look at the color gradients of galaxies at \\(12.5\\)), the color gradients are nearly flat with no dependence on mass, indicating that the stellar populations are more uniform throughout. The structural measurements presented are accurate to \\(20\\%\\) or better for most galaxies with F356W \\(<27.0\\) mag and will enable further studies of galaxy morphology to \\(z10\\).

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Background noise / Broadband / Color / Cosmic dust / Evolution / Galaxies / Morphology / Parameter estimation / Red shift / Stellar populations