Stellar Half-mass Radii of 0.5 z < 2.3 Galaxies: Comparison with JWST/NIRCam Half-light Radii

We use CEERS JWST/NIRCam imaging to measure rest-frame near-IR light profiles of 435 M-star > 1010 M-circle dot galaxies in the redshift range of 0.5 < z < 2.3. We compare the resulting rest-frame 1.5-2 mu m half-light radii (R-NIR ) with stellar half-mass radii ( R-M star ) derived with multicolor light profiles from CANDELS Hubble Space Telescope imaging. In general agreement with previous work, we find that R-NIR and R-M star are up to 40% smaller than the rest-frame optical half-light radius R-opt. The agreement between R(NIR )and R-M star is excellent, with a negligible systematic offset (<0.03 dex) up to z = 2 for quiescent galaxies and up to z = 1.5 for star-forming galaxies. We also deproject the profiles to estimate R-M star,R-3D , the radius of a sphere containing 50% of the stellar mass. We present the R-M(star )distribution of galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1.5, comparing R-opt, R-M star , and R-M star,R-3D . The slope is significantly flatter for R-M star and R-M star,3D compared to R-opt, mostly due to downward shifts in size for massive star-forming galaxies, while R-M star and R-M star,R-3D do not show markedly different trends. Finally, we show rapid evolution of the size (R infinity (1 + z)-1.7 +/- 0.1) of massive (M-star > 1011 M-circle dot) quiescent galaxies between z = 0.5 and z = 2.3, again comparing R-opt, R-M star , and R-M star,R-3D . We conclude that the main tenets of the evolution of the size narrative established over the past 20 yr, based on rest-frame optical light profile analysis, still hold in the era of JWST/NIRCam observations in the rest-frame near-IR.