Publikationsdatum:
2019-08-27
Beschreibung:
Upcoming space-based surveys such as Euclid and WFIRST-AFTA plan to measure Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) in order to study dark energy. These surveys will use IR slitless grism spectroscopy to measure redshifts of a large number of galaxies over a significant redshift range. In this paper, we use the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey (WISP) to estimate the expected number of H-alpha emitters observable by these future surveys. WISP is an ongoing Hubble Space Telescope slitless spectroscopic survey, covering the 0.8 - 1.65 micrometers wavelength range and allowing the detection of H-alpha emitters up to z approximately equal to 1.5 and [OIII] emitters to z approximately equal to 2.3. We derive the H-alpha-[OIII] bivariate line luminosity function for WISP galaxies at z approximately equal to 1 using a maximum likelihood estimator that properly accounts for uncertainties in line luminosity measurement, and demonstrate how it can be used to derive the H-alpha luminosity function from exclusively fitting [OIII] data. Using the z approximately equal to 2 [OIII] line luminosity function, and assuming that the relation between H-alpha and [OIII] luminosity does not change significantly over the redshift range, we predict the H-alpha number counts at z approximately equal to 2 - the upper end of the redshift range of interest for the future surveys. For the redshift range 0.7 less than z less than 2, we expect approximately 3000 galaxies per sq deg for a flux limit of 3 x 10(exp 16) ergs per sec per sq cm (the proposed depth of Euclid galaxy redshift survey) and approximately 20,000 galaxies per sq deg for a flux limit of approximately 10(exp 16) ergs per sec per sq cm (the baseline depth of WFIRST galaxy redshift survey).
Schlagwort(e):
Astrophysics; Astronomy; Statistics and Probability
Materialart:
GSFC-E-DAA-TN26511
Format:
application/pdf
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