Deeper Spectroscopy Research Articles

HST Grism Confirmation of 16 Structures at 1.4 < z < 2.8 from the Clusters Around Radio-Loud AGN (CARLA) Survey

Abstract We report spectroscopic results from our 40-orbit Hubble Space Telescope slitless grism spectroscopy program observing the 20 densest Clusters Around Radio-Loud AGN (CARLA) candidate galaxy clusters at 1.4 < z < 2.8. These candidate rich structures, among the richest and most distant known, were identified on the basis of [3.6]–[4.5] color from a 408 hr multi-cycle Spitzer program targeting 420 distant radio-loud AGN. We report the spectroscopic confirmation of 16 distant structures at 1.4 < z < 2.8 associated with the targeted powerful high-redshift radio-loud AGN. We also report the serendipitous discovery and spectroscopic confirmation of seven additional structures at 0.87 < z < 2.12 not associated with the targeted radio-loud AGN. We find that 1010–1011 M ⊙ member galaxies of our confirmed CARLA structures form significantly fewer stars than their field counterparts at all redshifts within 1.4 ≤ z ≤ 2. We also observe higher star-forming activity in the structure cores up to z = 2, finding similar trends as cluster surveys at slightly lower redshifts (1.0 < z < 1.5). By design, our efficient strategy of obtaining just two grism orbits per field only obtains spectroscopic confirmation of emission line galaxies. Deeper spectroscopy will be required to study the population of evolved, massive galaxies in these (forming) clusters. Lacking multi-band coverage of the fields, we adopt a very conservative approach of calling all confirmations “structures,” although we note that a number of features are consistent with some of them being bona fide galaxy clusters. Together this survey represents a unique and large homogenous sample of spectroscopically confirmed structures at high redshifts, potentially more than doubling the census of confirmed, massive clusters at z > 1.4.

VLT/XSHOOTER and Subaru/MOIRCS spectroscopy of HUDF.YD3: no evidence for Lyman α emission at z = 8.55★

We present spectroscopic observations with VLT/XSHOOTER and Subaru/MOIRCS of a relatively bright Y-band drop-out galaxy in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, first selected by Bunker et al. (2010), McLure et al. (2010) and Bouwens et al. (2010) to be a likely z~8-9 galaxy on the basis of its colours in the HST ACS and WFC3 images. This galaxy, HUDF.YD3 (also known as UDFy-38135539) has been targetted for VLT/SINFONI integral field spectroscopy by Lehnert et al. (2010), who published a candidate Lyman-alpha emission line at z=8.55 from this source. In our independent spectroscopy using two different infrared spectrographs (5 hours with VLT/XSHOOTER and 11 hours with Subaru/MOIRCS) we are unable to reproduce this line. We do not detect any emission line at the spectral and spatial location reported in Lehnert et al. (2010), despite the expected signal in our combined MOIRCS & XSHOOTER data being 5-sigma. The line emission also seems to be ruled out by the faintness of this object in recently extremely deep F105W (Y-band) HST/WFC3 imaging from HUDF12; the line would fall within this filter and such a galaxy should have been detected at Y(AB)=28.6mag (~20 sigma) rather than the marginal Y(AB)~30mag observed in the Y-band image, >3 times fainter than would be expected if the emission lie was real. Hence it appears highly unlikely that the reported Lyman-alpha line emission at z>8 is real, meaning that the highest-redshift sources for which Lyman-alpha emission has been seen are at z=6.9-7.2. It is conceivable that Lyman-alpha does not escape galaxies at higher redshifts, where the Gunn-Peterson absorption renders the Universe optically thick to this line. However, deeper spectroscopy on a larger sample of candidate z>7 galaxies will be needed to test this.

Quasar candidate selection and photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and UKIDSS data

We present a sample of 8498 quasars with both SDSS $ugriz$ optical and UKIDSS $YJHK$ near-IR photometric data. With this sample, we obtain the median colour-z relations based on 7400 quasars with magnitude uncertainties less than 0.1mag in all bands. By analyzing the quasar colours, we propose an empirical criterion in the $Y-K$ vs. $g-z$ colour-colour diagram to separate stars and quasars with redshift $z<4$, and two other criteria for selecting high-z quasars. Using the SDSS-UKIDSS colour-z relations, we estimate the photometric redshifts of 8498 SDSS-UKIDSS quasars, and find that 85.0% of them are consistent with the spectroscopic redshifts within $|\Delta z|<0.2$, which leads to a significant increase of the photometric redshift accuracy than that based on the SDSS colour-z relations only. We compare our colour selection criterion with a small UKIDSS/EDR quasar/star sample and a sample of 4671 variable sources in the SDSS Stripe 82 region with both SDSS and UKIDSS data, and find that they can be clearly divided into two classes (quasars and stars) by our criterion in the $Y-K$ vs. $g-z$ plot. We select 3834 quasar candidates from the variable sources with $g<20.5$ in Stripe 82, 826 of them being SDSS quasars and the rest without SDSS spectroscopy. We demonstrate that even at the same spectroscopy limit as SDSS, with our criterion we can at least partially recover the missing quasars with $z\sim2.7$ in SDSS. The SDSS identified quasars only take a small fraction (21.5%) of our quasar candidates selected from the variable sources in Stripe 82, indicating that a deeper spectroscopy is very promising in producing a larger sample of quasars than SDSS. The implications of our results to the future Chinese LAMOST quasar survey are also discussed.

ChandraDetection of the AM Canum Venaticorum Binary ES Ceti (KUV 01584−0939)

We report on Chandra ACIS observations of the ultracompact AM CVn binary ES Cet. This object has a 10.3 minute binary period and is the most compact of the confirmed AM CVn systems. We have, for the first time, unambiguously detected the X-ray counterpart to ES Cet. In a 20 ks ACIS-S image a point-like X-ray source is found within 1'' of the cataloged optical position. The mean count rate in ACIS-S is 0.013 s-1, and there is no strong evidence for variability. We folded the X-ray data using the optical ephemeris of Warner & Woudt, but did not detect any significant modulation. If a ~100% modulation similar to those seen in the ultracompact candidates V407 Vul and RX J0806.3+1527 were present, then we would have detected it. The upper limit (3 σ) to any modulation at the putative orbital period is ~15% (rms). We extract the first X-ray spectrum from ES Cet, and find that it is not well described by simple continuum models. We find suggestive evidence for discrete spectral components at ~470 and 890 eV that can be modeled as Gaussian emission lines. In comparison with recent X-ray detections of nitrogen and neon in another AM CVn system (GP Com), it appears possible that these features may represent emission lines from these same elements; however, deeper spectroscopy will be required to confirm this. Our best spectral model includes a blackbody continuum with kT = 0.8 keV along with the Gaussian lines. The unabsorbed 0.2-5 keV X-ray flux was ~7 × 10-14 ergs cm-2 s-1. The observed luminosity in the hard component is a small fraction of the total expected accretion luminosity, most of which should be radiated below 0.1 keV at the expected mass accretion rate for this orbital period. We discuss the implications of our results for the nature of ES Cet.

Microslit Nod‐Shuffle Spectroscopy: A Technique for Achieving Very High Densities of Spectra

ABSTRACTWe describe a new approach to obtaining very high surface densities of optical spectra in astronomical observations with extremely accurate subtraction of night sky emission. The observing technique requires that the telescope is nodded rapidly between targets and adjacent sky positions; object and sky spectra are recorded on adjacent regions of a low‐noise CCD through charge shuffling. This permits the use of extremely high densities of small slit apertures (“microslits”) since an extended slit is not required for sky interpolation. The overall multiobject advantage of this technique is as large as 2.9 times that of conventional multislit observing for an instrument configuration which has an underfilled CCD detector and is always greater than 1.5 for high target densities. The “nod‐shuffle” technique has been practically implemented at the Anglo‐Australian Telescope as the “LDSS++ project” and achieves sky subtraction accuracies as good as 0.04%, with even better performance possible. This is a factor of 10 better than is routinely achieved with long slits. LDSS++ has been used in various observational modes, which we describe, and for a wide variety of astronomical projects. The nod‐shuffle approach should be of great benefit to most spectroscopic (e.g., long slit, fiber, integral field) methods and would allow much deeper spectroscopy on very large telescopes (10 m or greater) than is currently possible. Finally, we discuss the prospects of using nod‐shuffle to pursue extremely long spectroscopic exposures (many days) and of mimicking nod‐shuffle observations with infrared arrays.