Over the last few years, both Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Spitzer observations have revealed a population of likely massive galaxies at z > 3 that was too faint to be detected inHubble Space Telescope (HST) rest-frame ultraviolet imaging. However, due to the very limited photometry for individual galaxies, the true nature of these so-called HST-dark galaxies has remained elusive. Here, we present the first sample of such galaxies observed with very deep, high-resolution NIRCam imaging from the Early Release Science programme CEERS. 30 HST-dark sources are selected based on their red colours across 1.6-4.4 {mu}m. Their physical properties are derived from 12-band multiwavelength photometry, including ancillary HST imaging. We find that these galaxies are generally heavily dust-obscured (A_V_ ~2 mag), massive (logM/M_{sun}) ~10), star-forming sources at z ~ 2-8 with an observed surface density of ~0.8 arcmin^-2^. This suggests that an important fraction of massive galaxies may have been missing from our cosmic census at z > 3 all the way into the Epoch of Reionization. The HST-dark sources lie on the main sequence of galaxies and add an obscured star formation rate density of 3.2^+1.8^-1.3_ * 10^-3^M_{sun}_/yr/Mpc^3^ at z ~ 7, showing likely presence of dust in the Epoch of Reionization. Our analysis shows the unique power of JWST to reveal this previously missing galaxy population and to provide a more complete census of galaxies at z = 2-8 based on rest-frame optical imaging.
Cone search capability for table J/MNRAS/522/449/tablea1 (HST-dark galaxy and derived properties by BAGPIPES code on HST/JWST/Spitzer/IRAC data)
