The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX): Description and Early Pilot Survey Results

By G. Hill, K. Gebhardt, E. Komatsu, N. Drory, P. MacQueen, J. Adams, G. Blanc, R. Koehler, M. Rafal, M. Roth and 8 more. 2008

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will outfit the 10 m HET with a new wide field and an array of 150 integral-field spectrographs to survey a 420 sq. deg. area in the north Galactic cap. Each fiber-coupled unit spectrograph will cover 350-550 nm, simultaneously. This instrument, called VIRUS, will produce ~34,000 spectra per exposure, and will open up the emission-line universe to large surveys for the first time. The survey will detect 0.8 million Lyman-alpha emitting (LAE) galaxies with 1.9<z<3.5 and more than a million [OII] emitting galaxies with z<0.5. The 3-D map of LAE galaxies in 9 cubic Gpc volume will be used to measure the expansion history at this early epoch using baryonic acoustic oscillations and the shape of the power spectrum. The aim of HETDEX is to provide a direct detection of dark energy at z~3. The measurement will constrain the evolution of dark energy and will also provide 0.1%-level accuracy on the curvature of the Universe, ten times better than current. The prototype of the VIRUS unit spectrograph (VIRUS-P) is a powerful instrument in its own right. Used on the McDonald 2.7 m, it covers the largest area of any integral field spectrograph, and reaches wavelengths down to 340 nm. VIRUS-P is being used for a pilot survey to better measure the properties of LAE galaxies in support of HETDEX. We report initial results from this survey.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/abcd4ae3603c03efc1c0138bdf9ce73f06b623c0

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Citations in the corpus

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 Galaxy Sample (2009, methodology): “Ongoing spectroscopic surveys aiming to use BAO to analyse dark energy include the BOSS (Schlegel et al. 2009a), the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX; Hill et al. 2008) and the WiggleZ survey (Glazebrook et al. 2007).”
Consistent modeling of velocity statistics and redshift-space distortions in one-loop perturbation theory (2020, methodology): “Our model should likewise be competitive in analyses of future high-redshift galaxy surveys like HETDEX [101], DESI [6], Euclid [7] and even futuristic LBG [63] or 21-cm [67] surveys, though as discussed in Section 3 the applicable range of scales will likely be limited more by the scale of stochast”