Lyα Emission-Line Galaxies at z = 3.1 in the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South

By C. Gronwall, R. Ciardullo, T. Hickey, E. Gawiser, J. Feldmeier, P. V. van Dokkum, C. Urry, D. Herrera, B. Lehmer, L. Infante and 6 more. 2007

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We describe the results of an extremely deep, 0.28 deg2 survey for z = 3.1 Lyα emission-line galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South. By using a narrowband 5000 Å filter and complementary broadband photometry from the MUSYC survey, we identify a statistically complete sample of 162 galaxies with monochromatic fluxes brighter than 1.5 × 10-17 ergs cm-2 s-1 and observer's frame equivalent widths greater than 80 Å. We show that the equivalent width distribution of these objects follows an exponential with a rest-frame scale length of w0 = 76 Å. In addition, we show that in the emission line, the luminosity function of Lyα galaxies has a faint-end power-law slope of α = -1.49, a bright-end cutoff of log L* = 42.64, and a space density above our detection thresholds of (1.46 ± 0.12) × 10-3 h galaxies Mpc-3. Finally, by comparing the emission-line and continuum properties of the Lyα emitters, we show that the star formation rates derived from Lyα are ~3 times lower than those inferred from the rest-frame UV continuum. We use this offset to deduce the existence of a small amount of internal extinction within the host galaxies. This extinction, coupled with the lack of extremely high equivalent width emitters, argues that these galaxies are not primordial Population III objects, although they are young and relatively chemically unevolved.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cbf77a0237faa2ed8fe658dc7bc35003ec23205

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Citations in the corpus

A Population of Faint Extended Line Emitters and the Host Galaxies of Optically Thick QSO Absorption Systems (2007, background): “…and the realization that Ly from emitters brighter by an order ofmagnitude have Ly emission reduced by a factor of 3, presumably by dust (e.g., Gronwall et al. 2007), would also explain at least in part the steep rise of the number of emitters over a decade in surface brightness as a drop in…”
A STEEP FAINT-END SLOPE OF THE UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTION AT z ∼ 2–3: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GLOBAL STELLAR MASS DENSITY AND STAR FORMATION IN LOW-MASS HALOS (2008, background): “The range of ages found for LAEs is ∼ 10 Myr at the low end to ∼ 1 Gyr at the high end, with typical ages of ∼ 100− 200 Myr, and low metallicity and reddening (e.g., Gronwall et al. 2007; Ouchi et al. 2008).”
SILVERRUSH. IV. Lyα luminosity functions at z = 5.7 and 6.6 studied with ∼1300 Lyα emitters on the 14–21 deg2 sky (2017, methodology): “In our simulations, we have adopted a Gaussian Lyα EW0 probability distribution (e.g., Shimasaku et al. 2006; Gronwall et al. 2007; Ouchi et al. 2008).”
Cosmic evolution of submillimeter galaxies and their contribution to stellar mass assembly (2009, unknown): “…al. (2007) 5.900 0.300 >0.0003 UV Shimasaku et al. (2005) 5.850 0.250 >0.0034 UV Stanway et al. (2003) 2.259 0.053 >0.0054 Lyα Nilsson et al. (2009) 2.379 0.023 >0.0024 Lyα Palunas et al. (2004) 3.110 0.020 >0.0120 Lyα Gronwall et al. (2007) 3.156 0.025 >0.0130 Lyα Nilsson et al. (2007) 3.135…”
THE HETDEX PILOT SURVEY. II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE Lyα ESCAPE FRACTION FROM THE ULTRAVIOLET SLOPE AND LUMINOSITY FUNCTION OF 1.9 (2010, methodology): “…the IFU survey by van Breukelen et al. (2005) only covered ∼ 104Mpc3 because of the small area surveyed, while the z ≃ 3.1 narrow-band survey by Gronwall et al. (2007) covered ∼ 105Mpc3 over a very narrow range of ∆z = 0.04 because of the large 36′ × 36′ area which can be imaged with the…”
Lyα-EMITTING GALAXIES AT z = 2.1 IN ECDF-S: BUILDING BLOCKS OF TYPICAL PRESENT-DAY GALAXIES? (2009, methodology): “Green circles represent the bias values calculated for this sample of LAEs and that from Gronwall et al. (2007) at z ' 3.1.”
AN ATLAS OF z = 5.7 AND z = 6.5 Lyα EMITTERS, (2010, background): “Other determinations at this redshift by van Breukelen et al. (2005), Gronwall et al. (2007), and Cowie & Hu (1998) are extremely similar, and we do not plot them separately.”
COMPLETING THE CENSUS OF Lyα EMITTERS AT THE REIONIZATION EPOCH (2011, background): “LAEs are generally recognized to be young, less massive galaxies with little dust (E(B − V ) < 0.05 at z ∼ 6 (Ono et al. 2010) and even at z ∼3 (Gronwall et al. 2007)), though old and massive stellar populations are found in some LAEs (Finkelstein et al. 2009).”
The Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey (SXDS). IV. Evolution of Lyα Emitters from z = 3.1 to 5.7 in the 1 deg2 Field: Luminosity Functions and AGN (2007, methodology): “Gronwall et al. (2007) have found that the SFRD contributed by z ¼ 3:1 LAEs is ’(6:5 8:6) ; 10 3 M yr 1 Mpc 3.”
SPECTROSCOPIC CONFIRMATION OF z ∼ 7 LYMAN BREAK GALAXIES: PROBING THE EARLIEST GALAXIES AND THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION (2011, background): “…Dijkstra et al. (2011), the observed EW-distribution function at z∼ 6 is modeled as an exponential function which provides a good fit to the observed one at lower redshifts (e.g. Gronwall et al. 2007), with a scalelength that corresponds to the median value observed by Stark et al. (2010) of 50Å.”
Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: discovery of a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies (2009, unknown): “For Lyα emitters, most are selected to have EW of Lyα > 20 Å and can range up to∼240Å or more (Gawiser et al. 2006; Gronwall et al. 2007).”
Evolution in the properties of Lyman-α emitters from redshifts z ~ 3 to z ~ 2 (2008, background): “Using the results from Matsuda et al. (2004), Saito et al (2006), Gronwall et al. (2007), and Prescott et al. (2008), the expected number density of Lyman-alpha blobs ranges from a few to a few hundred×10−6 Mpc−3.”
Lyα EMISSION FROM GREEN PEAS: THE ROLE OF CIRCUMGALACTIC GAS DENSITY, COVERING, AND KINEMATICS (2015, background): “…of this selection, Lyα luminosities in low-redshift samples—when measured—are around an order of magnitude lower than the luminosities of most Lyα-selected galaxies observed at z > 3 (Gronwall et al. 2007; Hu et al. 2010; Ouchi et al. 2010; Dressler et al. 2011, 2015; Henry et al. 2012).”
DIFFUSE Lyα EMITTING HALOS: A GENERIC PROPERTY OF HIGH-REDSHIFT STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “We note that the values in Table 3 for fesc,rel have been obtained using a method that appears to differ from that used in some recent work (e.g., Gronwall et al. 2007; Nilsson et al. 2009; Kornei et al. 2010).”
STELLAR POPULATIONS OF Lyα EMITTERS AT z ∼ 6–7: CONSTRAINTS ON THE ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS FROM GALAXY BUILDING BLOCKS (2010, background): “2003; Malhotra & Rhoads 2004; Taniguchi et al. 2005; Kashikawa et al. 2006; Shimasaku et al. 2006; Dawson et al. 2007; Gronwall et al. 2007; Murayama et al. 2007; Ouchi et al. 2008; Shioya et al. 2009; Nilsson et al. 2009; Guaita et al. 2010; Hayes et al. 2010).”
ON THE REDSHIFT EVOLUTION OF THE Lyα ESCAPE FRACTION AND THE DUST CONTENT OF GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “We then continue with the Reddy et al. (2008) UV data at 〈z〉 = 3.05, which we use to compute fLyαesc for the z = 3.1 Lyα samples of Gronwall et al. (2007) and Ouchi et al. (2008).”
Identification of the brightest Lyα emitters at z = 6.6 : Implications for the evolution of the luminosity function in the reionization era (2015, background): “5.1 The z = 5.7− 6.6 evolution of the LF Previous studies (e.g. van Breukelen et al. 2005; Ajiki et al. 2006; Shimasaku et al. 2006; Gronwall et al. 2007; Ouchi et al. 2008) have found that the observed Lyα luminosity function is remarkably constant between z = 3− 6.”