Wide‐Field Imaging of the Hubble Deep Field–South Region. II. The Evolution of Galaxy Clustering atz< 1

Abstract

We present the galaxy-galaxy angular correlations as a function of photometric redshift in a deep, wide galaxy survey centered on the Hubble Deep Field-South (HDF-S). Images were obtained with the Big Throughput Camera on the Blanco 4 m telescope at CTIO, of square degree in broadband uBVRI, reaching ~24 mag. Approximately 40,000 galaxies are detected in the survey. We determine photometric redshifts using galaxy template fitting to the photometry. Monte Carlo simulations show that redshifts from these data should be reliable out to z ~ 1, where the 4000 A break shifts into the I band. The inferred redshift distribution, n(z), shows good agreement with the distribution of galaxies measured in the Hubble Deep Field-North (HDF-N) and the Canada-France Redshift Survey. After assigning galaxies to redshift bins with width Δz = 0.33, we determine the two-point angular correlation function in each bin. We find that the amplitude of the correlation, Aw, drops across the three bins to redshift z ~ 1. Simple models of clustering evolution fit this result, with the best agreement for = 0. Hierarchical cold dark matter models best fit in a low-density, Λ-dominated universe.