AKARI OBSERVATION OF THE FLUCTUATION OF THE NEAR-INFRARED BACKGROUND

We report a search for fluctuations of the sky brightness toward the North Ecliptic Pole with AKARI, at 2.4, 3.2, and $4.1{\mu}m$. The stacked images with a diameter of 10 arcminutes of the AKARI-Monitor Field show a spatial structure on the scale of a few hundred arcseconds. A power spectrum analysis shows that there is a significant excess fluctuation at angular scales larger than 100 arcseconds that cannot be explained by zodiacal light, diffuse Galactic light, shot noise of faint galaxies, or clustering of low-redshift galaxies. These findings indicate that the detected fluctuation could be attributed to the first stars of the universe, i.e., Population III stars.