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We report a search for fluctuations of the sky brightness toward the north ecliptic pole with the Japanese infrared astronomical satellite AKARI, at 2.4, 3.2, and 4.1 µm. We obtained circular maps with 10' diameter fields of view, which clearly 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" that cannot be explained by zodiacal light, diffuse Galactic light, shot noise of faint galaxies, or clustering of low-redshift galaxies. These results are consistent with observations at 3.6 and 4.5 µm by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The fluctuating component observed at large angular scales has a blue stellar spectrum which is similar to that of the spectrum of the excess isotropic emission observed with the Infrared Telescope in Space. A significant spatial correlation between wavelength bands was found, and the slopes of the linear correlations are consistent with the spectrum of the excess fluctuation. These findings indicate that the detected fluctuation could be attributed to the first stars of the universe, i.e., Population III stars. The observed fluctuation provides an important constraint on the era of the first stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the average physical properties and star formation histories (SFHs) of the most UV-luminous star- forming galaxies at z ~ 3.7. Our results are based on the average spectral energy distributions (SEDs), constructed from stacked optical-to-infrared photometry, of a sample of the 1913 most UV-luminous star-forming galaxies found in 5.3 deg2 of the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey. We find that the shape of the average SED in the rest optical and infrared is fairly constant with UV luminosity, i.e., more UV-luminous galaxies are, on average, also more luminous at longer wavelengths. In the rest UV, however, the spectral slope β (≅dlogFλ/dlogλ; measured at 0.13 μm <λrest < 0.28μm) rises steeply with the median UV luminosity from -1.8 at L ≈ L* to -1.2 (L ~ 4-5L*). We use population synthesis analyses to derive their average physical properties and find that (I) LUV and thus star formation rates (SFRs) scale closely with stellar mass such that more UV-luminous galaxies are also more massive, (2) the median ages indicate that the stellar populations are relatively young (200-400 Myr) and show little correlation with UV luminosity, and (3) more UV-luminous galaxies are dustier than their less- luminous counterparts, such that L ≈ 4-5L* galaxies are extincted up to A(1600) = 2 mag while L ≈ L* galaxies have A(1600) = 0.7-1.5 mag. We argue that the average SFHs of UV-luminous galaxies are better described by models in which SFR increases with time in order to simultaneously reproduce the tight correlation between the UV-derived SFR and stellar mass and their universally young ages. We demonstrate the potential of measurements of the SFR-M* relation at multiple redshifts to discriminate between simple models of SFHs. Finally, we discuss the fate of these UV-brightest galaxies in the next 1-2 Gyr and their possible connection to the most massive galaxies at z ~ 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]