zCOSMOS: A Large VLT/VIMOS Redshift Survey Covering 0 < z < 3 in the COSMOS Field

By S. Lilly, O. Fèvre, A. Renzini, G. Zamorani, M. Scodeggio, Thierry Contini, C. Carollo, G. Hasinger, Jean-Paul Kneib, A. Iovino and 67 more. 2006

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zCOSMOS is a large-redshift survey that is being undertaken in the COSMOS field using 600 hr of observation with the VIMOS spectrograph on the 8 m VLT. The survey is designed to characterize the environments of COSMOS galaxies from the 100 kpc scales of galaxy groups up to the 100 Mpc scale of the cosmic web and to produce diagnostic information on galaxies and active galactic nuclei. The zCOSMOS survey consists of two parts: (1) zCOSMOS-bright, a magnitude-limited I-band IAB < 22.5 sample of about 20,000 galaxies with 0.1 < z < 1.2 covering the whole 1.7 deg2 COSMOS ACS field, for which the survey parameters at z ~ 0.7 are designed to be directly comparable to those of the 2dFGRS at z ~ 0.1; and (2) zCOSMOS-deep, a survey of approximately 10,000 galaxies selected through color-selection criteria to have 1.4 < z < 3.0, within the central 1 deg 2. This paper describes the survey design and the construction of the target catalogs and briefly outlines the observational program and the data pipeline. In the first observing season, spectra of 1303 zCOSMOS-bright targets and 977 zCOSMOS-deep targets have been obtained. These are briefly analyzed to demonstrate the characteristics that may be expected from zCOSMOS, and particularly zCOSMOS-bright, when it is finally completed between 2008 and 2009. The power of combining spectroscopic and photometric redshifts is demonstrated, especially in correctly identifying the emission line in single-line spectra and in determining which of the less reliable spectroscopic redshifts are correct and which are incorrect. These techniques bring the overall success rate in the zCOSMOS-bright so far to almost 90% and to above 97% in the 0.5 < z < 0.8 redshift range. Our zCOSMOS-deep spectra demonstrate the power of our selection techniques to isolate high-redshift galaxies at 1.4 < z < 3.0 and of VIMOS to measure their redshifts using ultraviolet absorption lines.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

Weak Gravitational Lensing with COSMOS: Galaxy Selection and Shape Measurements (2007, methodology): “COSMOS presents a unique advantage, in terms of current weak-lensing surveys, of a prodigious multiwavelength followup combined with the planned measurement of 50,000 spectroscopic redshifts by the ongoing zCOSMOS program (Lilly et al. 2007).”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “Estimating Photometric Redshifts While a spectroscopic survey, zCOSMOS, is ongoing in the COSMOS field (Lilly et al. 2007), the large samples required for this work necessitate the use of photometric redshifts.”
Euclid preparation (2021, methodology): “Weighting of the spectroscopic sample, therefore, must correct for the mix of spectroscopic selection effects present in the training sample, as a function of magnitude (from the various magnitude limits of the individual spectroscopic surveys), colour (from their various preselections in colour and”
THE XMM-NEWTON WIDE-FIELD SURVEY IN THE COSMOS FIELD (XMM-COSMOS): DEMOGRAPHY AND MULTIWAVELENGTH PROPERTIES OF OBSCURED AND UNOBSCURED LUMINOUS ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, background): “…Trump et al. 2007, 2009), from the VIMOS/zCOSMOS bright project (∼ 500 objects, Lilly et al. 2009), from the VIMOS/zCOSMOS faint project (∼ 80 objects, Lilly et al. 2007) or were already present either in the SDSS survey catalog (∼ 100 objects, Adelman-McCarthy et al. 2005, Kauffman et al. 20034)…”
COSMOS PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS WITH 30-BANDS FOR 2-deg2 (2008, methodology): “The zCOSMOS survey (Lilly et al. 2007) has two components: zCOSMOS-bright with a sample of 20,000 galaxies selected at i∗ ≤ 22.5 and zCOSMOS-faint with approximately 10,000 galaxies color-selected to lie in the redshift range 1.5 . z .”
THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF MASS-SELECTED GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS FIELD (2010, methodology): “Thanks to extensive spectroscopic efforts at optical wavelentghs using VLT/VIMOS and Magellan/IMACS (Lilly et al. 2007; Trump et al. 2007) the estimation of photometric redshifts for all these sources could be accurately calibrated.”
THE COSMOS-WIRCam NEAR-INFRARED IMAGING SURVEY. I. BzK-SELECTED PASSIVE AND STAR-FORMING GALAXY CANDIDATES AT z ≳ 1.4 (2009, methodology): “Moreover, spectroscopic redshifts of 148sBzK galaxies with a z̄∼ 2.2 from the early zCOSMOS survey (Lilly et al. 2007b) have been used to check and train these photometric redshifts in this important redshift range.”
EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, background): “A different option has emerged with the advent of data sets from large galaxy surveys (York et al. 2000; Colless et al. 2001; Lilly et al. 2007; Driver et al. 2011; Grogin et al. 2011; McCracken et al. 2012) and avoids explicitly modelling the baryonic physics.”
EVOLUTION OF GALAXIES AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS AT z = 0.1–3 IN COSMOS (2013, methodology): “Spectroscopy of such faint galaxies requires the largest telescopes and integration times of a few hours (Le Fèvre et al. 2005; Gerke et al. 2005; Meneux et al. 2006; Cooper et al. 2006; Coil et al. 2006; Lilly et al. 2007).”
The incidence of obscuration in active galactic nuclei (2013, background): “Finally, the extensive spectroscopic follow-up granted through the zCOSMOS (Lilly et al. 2007, 2009) and Magellan/IMACS (Trump et al. 2007, 2009) projects also plays a crucial role for the study we present here, together with archival data from the SDSS DR9 (Ahn et al. 2012).”