PEARLS: Discovery of Point-Source Features Within Galaxies in the North Ecliptic Pole Time Domain Field

The first public 0.9-4.4 μm NIRCam images of the North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) Time Domain Field (TDF) uncovered many galaxies that display point-source features in their cores as seen in the longer wavelength filters. We visually identified a sample of 66 galaxies (∼1 galaxy per arcmin^2) with point-like cores and fit their spectral energy distributions (SED)s using EAZY and CIGALE to characterize the sample's active galactic nucleus (AGN) and host galaxy parameters. Single-template fitting best fits 70% of the sample with a Seyfert-blended SED. With CIGALE we compute the median fractional AGN contribution to the 0.1-30.0 μm flux to be 0.30±0.06, and that 56% of the 66 galaxies have star-formation rates in the starburst range whereas the remainder are near the star-formation main sequence. There are Very Large Array (VLA) 3 GHz detections for 24/66 galaxies, implying some combination of AGN emission and vigorous star formation. We present a novel sample selection procedure in tandem to the morphological sample selection based on objects' light profiles at 4.4 μm. This procedure identifies a parameter space which probes point-source features and automatically recovers our visual sample with minimal contamination from both stars and brighter galaxies. This procedure may be used in other extant and future NIRCam images to streamline the search for galaxies with point-like cores. The morphological approach to recognizing AGN is being resurrected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by virtue of its superb angular resolution at infrared wavelengths.