Abstract
Surveys of faint galaxies at high redshifts often result in a "pencil-beam" geometry that is much longer along the line-of-sight than across the sky. We explore the effects of this geometry on the abundance and clustering of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) and Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) in current and future surveys based on cosmological N-body simulations which adequately describe the nonlinear growth of structure on small scales and compare to linear theory. We find that the probability distribution of the LBG abundance is skewed toward low values since the narrow transverse dimension of the survey is more likely to probe underdense regions. Over a range that spans 1--2 orders of magnitude in galaxy luminosities, the variance in the number of objects differs from the commonly used analytic prediction and is not dominated by Poisson noise. Additionally, nonlinear bias on small scales results in a one-dimensional power spectrum of LAEs using a James Webb Space Telescope field-of-view that is relatively flat, markedly different from the expectation of linear perturbation theory. We discuss how these results may affect attempts to measure the UV background at high redshifts, estimate the relationship between halo mass and galaxy luminosity, and probe reionization by measuring the power-modulating effect of ionized regions.
Highlights
Over the past few years, searches for Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) and Lyman α emitters (LAEs) have revealed new populations of young, star-forming objects at redshift beyond z = 6 (e.g. Stark et al 2007a; Bouwens et al 2008, 2009; Richard et al 2008) that shed light on the star formation history at high redshifts and the sources responsible for cosmic re-ionization
Evidence has been found for a population of massive, evolved systems around z = 5 (Mobasher et al 2005; Wiklind et al 2008) that hints at an earlier period of higher star formation than has yet to be seen in surveys of bright LBGs and LAEs
It is expected that the bulk of the star formation during re-ionization had taken place in less luminous galaxies than previously observed (e.g. Barkana & Loeb 2001; Wyithe & Loeb 2006)
Summary
Stark et al 2007a; Bouwens et al 2008, 2009; Richard et al 2008) that shed light on the star formation history at high redshifts and the sources responsible for cosmic re-ionization. It has been shown that cosmic re-ionization in the high-redshift Universe can be probed by observing its effects on the galaxy power spectrum Our goal is to relate the theory of structure formation to the large amount of observational data from high-redshift galaxy surveys.
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