skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 11:00 PM ET on Friday, September 13 until 2:00 AM ET on Saturday, September 14 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: The Magellan M2FS Spectroscopic Survey of High-redshift Galaxies: A Sample of 260 Ly α Emitters at Redshift z ≈ 5.7
Award ID(s):
1908284
NSF-PAR ID:
10292644
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The Astrophysical Journal
Volume:
903
Issue:
1
ISSN:
1538-4357
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Using the IRAM NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), we conducted a program to measure redshifts for 13 bright galaxies detected in the Herschel Astrophysical Large Area Survey with S 500  μ m  ≥ 80 mJy. We report reliable spectroscopic redshifts for 12 individual sources, which are derived from scans of the 3 and 2 mm bands, covering up to 31 GHz in each band, and are based on the detection of at least two emission lines. The spectroscopic redshifts are in the range 2.08 <   z  <  4.05 with a median value of z  = 2.9 ± 0.6. The sources are unresolved or barely resolved on scales of 10 kpc. In one field, two galaxies with different redshifts were detected. In two cases the sources are found to be binary galaxies with projected distances of ∼140 kpc. The linewidths of the sources are large, with a mean value for the full width at half maximum of 700 ± 300 km s −1 and a median of 800 km s −1 . We analyze the nature of the sources with currently available ancillary data to determine if they are lensed or hyper-luminous ( L FIR  >  10 13   L ⊙ ) galaxies. We also present a reanalysis of the spectral energy distributions including the continuum flux densities measured at 3 and 2 mm to derive the overall properties of the sources. Future prospects based on these efficient measurements of redshifts of high- z galaxies using NOEMA are outlined, including a comprehensive survey of all the brightest Herschel galaxies. 
    more » « less
  2. ABSTRACT

    K-corrections – a necessary ingredient for converting between flux in observed bands to flux in rest-frame bands – are critical for comparing galaxies at differing redshifts. These corrections often rely on fits to empirical or theoretical spectral energy distribution (SED) templates of galaxies. However, templates can only produce reliable K-corrections in regimes where SED models are robust. For instance, the templates utilized in some popular software packages are not well-constrained in some bands (e.g. WISE W4 in Kcorrect), which results in ill-behaved K-corrections. We address this shortcoming by developing an empirically driven approach to K-corrections that limits the dependence on SED templates. We perform a polynomial fit for the K-correction as a function of a galaxy’s rest-frame colour determined in a pair of well-constrained bands (e.g. 0(g − r)) and redshift, exploiting the fact that galaxy SEDs can be approximated as a one-parameter family at low redshift. For bands well-constrained by SED templates, our empirically driven K-corrections yield results comparable to the SED fitting methods used by Kcorrect and the GSWLC-M2 catalogue (the updated medium-deep GALEX–SDSS–WISE Legacy Catalogue). However, our method dramatically outperforms Kcorrect derived K-corrections for WISE W4. Our method is also robust to incorrect template assumptions outside of the optical bands and enforces that the K-correction must be zero at z = 0. Our K-corrected photometry and code are publicly available.

     
    more » « less