English

A WFC3 Grism Emission Line Redshift Catalog in the GOODS-South Field

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-05-20 v1

Abstract

We combine HST/WFC3 imaging and G141 grism observations from the CANDELS and 3D-HST surveys to produce a catalog of grism spectroscopic redshifts for galaxies in the CANDELS/GOODS-South field. The WFC3/G141 grism spectra cover a wavelength range of 1.1<lambda<1.7 microns with a resolving power of R~130 for point sources, thus providing rest-frame optical spectra for galaxies out to z~3.5. The catalog is selected in the H-band (F160W) and includes both galaxies with and without previously published spectroscopic redshifts. Grism spectra are extracted for all H-band detected galaxies with H<24 and a CANDELS photometric redshift z_phot > 0.6. The resulting spectra are visually inspected to identify emission lines and redshifts are determined using cross-correlation with empirical spectral templates. To establish the accuracy of our redshifts, we compare our results against high-quality spectroscopic redshifts from the literature. Using a sample of 411 control galaxies, this analysis yields a precision of sigma_NMAD=0.0028 for the grism-derived redshifts, which is consistent with the accuracy reported by the 3D-HST team. Our final catalog covers an area of 153 square arcmin and contains 1019 redshifts for galaxies in GOODS-S. Roughly 60% (608/1019) of these redshifts are for galaxies with no previously published spectroscopic redshift. These new redshifts span a range of 0.677 < z < 3.456 and have a median redshift of z=1.282. The catalog contains a total of 234 new redshifts for galaxies at z>1.5. In addition, we present 20 galaxy pair candidates identified for the first time using the grism redshifts in our catalog, including four new galaxy pairs at z~2, nearly doubling the number of such pairs previously identified.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.02659,
  title  = {A WFC3 Grism Emission Line Redshift Catalog in the GOODS-South Field},
  author = {Aaron M. Morris and Dale D. Kocevski and Jonathan R. Trump and Benjamin J. Weiner and Nimish P. Hathi and Guillermo Barro and Tomas Dahlen and Sandra M. Faber and Steven L. Finkelstein and Adriano Fontana and Henry C. Ferguson and Norman A. Grogin and Ruth Grützbauch and Yicheng Guo and Li-Ting Hsu and Anton M. Koekemoer and David C. Koo and Bahram Mobasher and Janine Pforr and Mara Salvato and Tommy Wiklind and Stijn Wuyts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.02659},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

25 Pages, 9 Figures, submitted to AJ