The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is a large-volume spectroscopic survey without pre-selection of sources, searching ~ 540 deg^2 for Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs) at 1.9 < z < 3.5. Taking advantage of such a wide-volume survey, we perform a pilot study using early HETDEX data to search for lensed Lyman-alpha emitters. After performing a proof-of-concept using a previously known lensed LAE covered by HETDEX, we perform a search for previously unknown lensed LAEs in the HETDEX spectroscopic sample. We present a catalog of 26 potential LAEs lensed by foreground, red, non-star-forming galaxies at z ~ 0.4 - 0.7. We estimate the magnification for each candidate system, finding 12 candidates to be within the strong lensing regime (magnification μ > 2). Follow-up observations of these potential lensed LAEs have the potential to confirm their lensed nature and explore these distant galaxies in more detail.
@article{arxiv.2210.07249,
title = {A Search for Lensed Lyman-Alpha Emitters within the Early HETDEX Data Set},
author = {Isaac H. Laseter and Steven L. Finkelstein and Micaela J. Bagley and Dustin M. Davis and Karl Gebhardt and Caryl Gronwall and Robin Ciardullo and Gregory R. Zeimann and Erin Mentuch Cooper and Daniel Farrow},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.07249},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
28 pages, 31 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ