A deep and High-resolution Study of Ultra-diffuse Galaxies in Distant Massive Galaxy Clusters

Ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) are intriguing in the sense that they are much larger than dwarf galaxies but have much lower surface brightness than normal galaxies. To date, UDGs have been found only in the local universe. Taking advantage of deep and high-resolution HST images, we search for UDGs in massive galaxy clusters in the distant universe. In this work, we present our search results of UDGs in three massive clusters of the Hubble Frontier Fields: Abell 2744 (z=0.308), Abell S1063 (z=0.348), and Abell 370 (z=0.375). These clusters are the most distant and massive among the host systems of known UDGs. The color-magnitude diagrams of these clusters show that UDGs are mainly located in the faint end of the red sequence. This means that most UDGs in these clusters consist of old stars. Interestingly, we found a few blue UDGs, which implies that they had recent star formation. The radial number densities of UDGs clearly decrease in the central region of the clusters in contrast to those of bright galaxies which keep rising. This implies that a large fraction of UDGs in the central region were tidally disrupted. These features are consistent with those of UDGs in nearby galaxy clusters. We estimate the total number of UDGs (N(UDG)) in each cluster. The abundance of UDGs shows a tight relation with the virial masses (M_200) of thier host systems: M_200 \propto N(UDG)^(1.01+/-0.05). This slope is found to be very close to one, indicating that efficiency of UDGs does not significantly depend on the host environments. Furthermore, estimation of dynamical masses of UDGs indicates that most UDGs have dwarf-like masses (M_200 < 10^11 M_Sun), but a few UDGs have $L{\ast}$-like masses (M_200 > 10^11 M_Sun). In summary, UDGs in distant massive clusters are found to be similar to those in the local universe.