3D-HST: A wide-field grism spectroscopic survey with the Hubble Space Telescope
Abstract
We present 3D-HST, a near-infrared spectroscopic Treasury program with the Hubble Space Telescope for studying the processes that shape galaxies in the distant Universe. 3D-HST provides rest-frame optical spectra for a sample of ~7000 galaxies at 1<z<3.5, the epoch when 60% of all star formation took place, the number density of quasars peaked, the first galaxies stopped forming stars, and the structural regularity that we see in galaxies today must have emerged. 3D-HST will cover 3/4 (625 sq.arcmin) of the CANDELS survey area with two orbits of primary WFC3/G141 grism coverage and two to four parallel orbits with the ACS/G800L grism. In the IR these exposure times yield a continuum signal-to-noise of ~5 per resolution element at H~23.1 and a 5sigma emission line sensitivity of 5x10-17 erg/s/cm2 for typical objects, improving by a factor of ~2 for compact sources in images with low sky background levels. The WFC3/G141 spectra provide continuous wavelength coverage from 1.1-1.6 um at a spatial resolution of ~0."13, which, combined with their depth, makes them a unique resource for studying galaxy evolution. We present the preliminary reduction and analysis of the grism observations, including emission line and redshift measurements from combined fits to the extracted grism spectra and photometry from ancillary multi-wavelength catalogs. The present analysis yields redshift estimates with a precision of sigma(z)=0.0034(1+z), or sigma(v)~1000 km/s. We illustrate how the generalized nature of the survey yields near-infrared spectra of remarkable quality for many different types of objects, including a quasar at z=4.7, quiescent galaxies at z~2, and the most distant T-type brown dwarf star known. The CANDELS and 3D-HST surveys combined will provide the definitive imaging and spectroscopic dataset for studies of the 1<z<3.5 Universe until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1204.2829,
title = {3D-HST: A wide-field grism spectroscopic survey with the Hubble Space Telescope},
author = {Gabriel Brammer and Pieter van Dokkum and Marijn Franx and Mattia Fumagalli and Shannon Patel and Hans-Walter Rix and Rosalind Skelton and Mariska Kriek and Erica Nelson and Kasper Schmidt and Rachel Bezanson and Elisabete da Cunha and Dawn Erb and Xiaohui Fan and Natascha Förster Schreiber and Garth Illingworth and Ivo Labbé and Joel Leja and Britt Lundgren and Dan Magee and Danilo Marchesini and Patrick McCarthy and Ivelina Momcheva and Adam Muzzin and Ryan Quadri and Charles Steidel and Tomer Tal and David Wake and Katherine Whitaker and Anna Williams},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.2829},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Replacement reflects version now accepted by ApJS. A preliminary data release intended to provide a general illustration of the WFC3 grism data is available at http://3dhst.research.yale.edu/