The Impact of Dust on the Sizes of Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization

We study the sizes of galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization using a sample of ∼100, 000 galaxies from the BlueTides cosmological hydrodynamical simulation from z = 7 to 11. We measure the galaxy sizes from stellar mass and luminosity maps, defining the effective radius as the minimum radius which could enclose the pixels containing 50% of the total mass/light in the image. We find an inverse relationship between stellar mass and effective half-mass radius, suggesting that the most massive galaxies are more compact and dense than lower mass galaxies, which have flatter mass distributions. We find a mildly negative relation between intrinsic far-ultraviolet luminosity and size, while we find a positive size–luminosity relation when measured from dust-attenuated images. This suggests that dust is the predominant cause of the observed positive size–luminosity relation, with dust preferentially attenuating bright sight lines resulting in a flatter emission profile and thus larger measured effective radii. We study the size–luminosity relation across the rest-frame ultraviolet and optical, and find that the slope decreases at longer wavelengths; this is a consequence of the relation being caused by dust, which produces less attenuation at longer wavelengths. We find that the far-ultraviolet size–luminosity relation shows mild evolution from z = 7 to 11, and galaxy size evolves with redshift as R∝(1 + z)^−m, where m = 0.662 ± 0.009. Finally, we investigate the sizes of z = 7 quasar host galaxies, and find that while the intrinsic sizes of quasar hosts are small relative to the overall galaxy sample, they have comparable sizes when measured from dust-attenuated images.