The GLARE Survey – II. Faint z≈ 6 Lyα line emitters in the HUDF

Abstract

The galaxy population at z≈ 6 has been the subject of intense study in recent years, culminating in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) – the deepest imaging survey yet. A large number of high-redshift galaxy candidates have been identified within the HUDF, but until now analysis of their properties has been hampered by the difficulty of obtaining spectroscopic redshifts for these faint galaxies. Our ‘Gemini Lyman-Alpha at Reionization Era’ (GLARE) project has been designed to undertake spectroscopic follow-up of faint (z′ 5.5, and a further nine possible line emitters with detections at lower significance. We also place tight constraints on the equivalent width of Lyα emission for a further ten i′-drop galaxies and examine the equivalent width distribution of this faint spectroscopic sample of z≈ 6 galaxies. We find that the fraction of galaxies with little or no emission is similar to that at z≈ 3, but that the z≈ 6 population has a tail of sources with high rest-frame equivalent widths. Possible explanations for this effect include a tendency towards stronger line emission in faint sources, which may arise from extreme youth or low metallicity in the Lyman-break population at high redshift, or possibly a top-heavy initial mass function.