We describe the ensemble properties of the 1.9<z<3.5 Lyman Alpha Emitters (LAEs) found in the HETDEX survey's first public data release, HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1 (Mentuch Cooper et al. 2023). Stacking the low-resolution (R∼ 800) spectra greatly increases the signal-to-noise ratio, revealing spectral features otherwise hidden by noise, and we show that the stacked spectrum is representative of an average member of the set. The flux limited, Lyα signal-to-noise ratio restricted stack of 50K HETDEX LAEs shows the ensemble biweight ``average" z∼2.6 LAE to be a blue (UV continuum slope ∼−2.4 and E(B-V) <0.1), moderately bright (MUV∼−19.7) star forming galaxy with strong Lyα emission (log LLyα∼ 42.8 and Wλ(Lyα) ∼ 114\AA), and potentially significant leakage of ionizing radiation. The restframe UV light is dominated by a young, metal poor stellar population with an average age 5-15 Myr and metallicity of 0.2-0.3 Z⊙.
@article{arxiv.2307.03096,
title = {HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1 -- Stacking 50K Lyman Alpha Emitters},
author = {Dustin Davis and Karl Gebhardt and Erin Mentuch Cooper and William P. Bowman and Barbara Garcia Castanheira and John Chisholm and Robin Ciardullo and Maximilian Fabricius and Daniel J. Farrow and Steven L. Finkelstein and Caryl Gronwall and Eric Gawiser and Gary J. Hill and Ulrich Hopp and Lindsay R. House and Donghui Jeong and Wolfram Kollatschny and Eiichiro Komatsu and Chenxu Liu and Maja Lujan Niemeyer and Alberto Saldana-Lopez and Shun Saito and Donald P. Schneider and Jan Snigula and Sarah Tuttle and Laurel H. Weiss and Lutz Wisotzki and Gregory Zeimann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03096},
year = {2023}
}