Predicting the redshift 2 Hα luminosity function using [O iii] emission line galaxies

Journal Article · Thu Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 2015 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/811/2/141· OSTI ID:22882516

Mehta, Vihang; Scarlata, Claudia; Bagley, Micaela; Beck, Melanie; Rutkowski, Michael ^[1]; Colbert, James W. ^[2]; Dai, Y. S.; Teplitz, Harry I.; Wang, Yun ^[3]; Dressler, Alan ^[4]; Henry, Alaina; Rafelski, Marc ^[5]; Malkan, Matt; Ross, Nathaniel R. ^[6]; Siana, Brian ^[7]

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1. Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (United States)
2. Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
3. Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
4. Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA 91101 (United States)
5. Astrophysics Science Division, Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 665, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
6. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (United States)
7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 (United States)

Upcoming space-based surveys such as Euclid and WFIRST-AFTA plan to measure baryonic acoustic oscillations 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 Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey (WISP) to estimate the expected number of Hα emitters observable by these future surveys. WISP is an ongoing Hubble Space Telescope slitless spectroscopic survey, covering the 0.8–1.65 μm wavelength range and allowing the detection of Hα emitters up to z ∼ 1.5 and [O iii] emitters to z ∼ 2.3. We derive the Hα–[O iii] bivariate line luminosity function (LLF) for WISP galaxies at z ∼ 1 using a maximum likelihood estimator that properly accounts for uncertainties in line luminosity measurements and we demonstrate how it can be used to derive the Hα luminosity function by exclusively fitting [O iii] data. Using the z∼2 [O iii] LLF and assuming that the relation between Hα and [O iii] luminosity does not change significantly over the redshift range, we predict the Hα number counts at z∼2—the upper end of the redshift range of interest for future surveys. For the redshift range 0.7

• OSTI ID: 22882516
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 811; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United Kingdom
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
BALMER LINES
BARYONS
DETECTION
EMISSION
FUNCTIONS
GALACTIC EVOLUTION
GALAXIES
LUMINOSITY
MASS
MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD FIT
NONLUMINOUS MATTER
OSCILLATIONS
RED SHIFT
SPACE
SPECTROSCOPY
STATISTICS
TELESCOPES
WAVELENGTHS