THE RESOLVED NEAR-INFRARED EXTRAGALACTIC BACKGROUND

We present a current best estimate of the integrated near-infrared (NIR) extragalactic background light (EBL) attributable to resolved galaxies (Integrated Galaxy Light, IGL) in J, H, and K-s. Our results for measurements of nu I nu. in units of nW m(-2) sr(-1) are 11.7(-2.6)(+5.6) in J, 11.5(-1.5)(+4.5) in H, and 10.0(-0.8)(+2.8) in K-s. We derive these new limits by combining our deep wide-field NIR photometry from five widely separated fields with other studies from the literature to create a galaxy counts sample that is highly complete and has good counting statistics out to JHK(s) similar to 27-28. As part of this effort we present new ultra-deep K-s-band galaxy counts from 22 hr of observations with the Multi Object Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS) instrument on the Subaru Telescope. We use this MOIRCS K-s-band mosaic to estimate the total missing flux from sources beyond our detection limits. Our new limits to the NIR EBL are in basic agreement with, but 10%-20% higher than, previous estimates, bringing them into better agreement with estimates of the total NIR EBL (resolved + unresolved sources) obtained from TeV gamma-ray opacity measurements and recent direct measurements of the total NIR EBL as well as the modeled NIR IGL. We examine field-to-field variations in our photometry to show that the integrated light from galaxies is isotropic to within uncertainties, consistent with the expected large-scale isotropy of the EBL. Our data also allow for a robust estimate of the NIR light from Galactic stars, which we find to be 14.7 +/- 2.4 in J, 10.1 +/- 1.9 in H, and 7.6 +/- 1.8 in K-s in units of nW m(-2) sr(-1).