A Lyman Break Galaxy Candidate at z ~ 9

We report the discovery of a z ~ 9 Lyman break galaxy candidate, selected from the NICMOS Parallel Imaging Survey as a J-dropout with J110 − H160 = 1.7. Spitzer/IRAC photometry reveals that the galaxy has a blue H160 − 3.6 μm color and a spectral break between 3.6 and 4.5 μm. We interpret this break as the Balmer break and derive a best-fit photometric redshift of z ~ 9. We use Monte Carlo simulations to test the significance of this photometric redshift, and we show that there is a 96% probability of z ≥ 7. We estimate that the lower limit to the comoving number density of such galaxies at z ~ 9 is phi > 3.8 × 10^−6 Mpc^−3. If the high redshift of this galaxy is confirmed, this will indicate that the luminous end of the rest-frame UV luminosity function has not evolved substantially from z ~ 9 to z ~ 3. Still, some small degeneracy remains between this z ~ 9 model and models at z ~ 2–3; deep optical imaging (reaching IAB ~ 29) can rule out the lower z models