Abstract

The study of the extragalactic background light (EBL) in the optical and near-infrared has received a lot of attention in the last decade, especially near the wavelength lambda approximate to 3.4 mu m, with remaining tension among different techniques for estimating the background. In this paper we present a measurement of the contribution of galaxies to the EBL at 3.4 mu m that is based on the measurement of the luminosity function (LF) in Lake et al. and the mean spectral energy distribution of galaxies in Lake & Wright. The mean and standard deviation of our most reliable Bayesian posterior chain gives a 3.4 mu m background of I-nu = 9.0 +/- 0.5 kJy sr(-1) (nu I-nu = 8.0 +/- 0.4 nW m(-2) sr(-1) e-fold(-1)), with systematic uncertainties unlikely to be greater than 2 kJy sr(-1). This result is higher than most previous efforts to measure the contribution of galaxies to the 3.4 mu m EBL, but is consistent with the upper limits placed by blazars and the most recent direct measurements of the total 3.4 mu m EBL.