Cosmological Observational Tests in the JWST Era. II: The Tolman Test

Abstract: In this work, we investigate a classical cosmological test - the dependence of galaxy surface brightness on redshift z (the Tolman test). We analyzed 6 860 galaxies with reliably determined spectroscopic redshifts from the ASTRODEEP-JWST photometric catalogue. We find that (a) the mean surface brightness of galaxies indeed decreases with increasing distance, and (b) the observed trend shows a significant departure from the prediction of the standard cosmological model, which expects the mean surface brightness to decline as ~ (1 + z)^-4.