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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
When and how did galaxies form? In order to understand this important problem in astrophysics, many observational studies have been conducted so far. Deep survey observations in the optical are powerful for detecting very faint sources in the high-z universe The observed surface density of such high-z star forming galaxies may, however, be smaller than the value expected from the local density of luminous galaxies (e.g., Lanzetta et al. 1996; Steidel et al. 1996) and it is possible that we are missing classes of objects with substantial reddening and have not yet sampled fully the high-z counterparts of typical nearby galaxies. Since the nearby, well evolved galaxies consist of old low-mass stars, it is important to find galaxies with numerous low-mass stars. These stars emit their energy from the optical to near infrared (NIR) mostly, implying that they are more luminous in the NIR and MIR (mid-infrared) than in the optical if they were present at high redshifts.