CALYMHA survey. I.

DOI

We present the CAlibrating LYMan-{alpha} with H{alpha} (CALYMHA) pilot survey and new results on Lyman {alpha} (Ly{alpha}) selected galaxies at z~2. We use a custom-built Ly{alpha} narrow-band filter at the Isaac Newton Telescope, designed to provide a matched volume coverage to the z=2.23H{alpha} HiZELS survey. Here, we present the first results for the COSMOS and UDS fields. Our survey currently reaches a 3{sigma} line flux limit of ~4x10^-17^erg/s/cm^2^, and a Ly{alpha} luminosity limit of ~10^42.3^erg/s. We find 188 Ly{alpha} emitters over 7.3x10^5^Mpc^3^, but also find significant numbers of other line-emitting sources corresponding to HeII, CIII] and CIV emission lines. These sources are important contaminants, and we carefully remove them, unlike most previous studies. We find that the Ly{alpha} luminosity function at z=2.23 is very well described by a Schechter function up to L_Ly{alpha}~=10^43^erg/s^ with L=10^42.59(10^42.75^-10^42.01^)erg/s, {phi}=10^-3.09^(10^-3.43^-10^2.95)Mpc^-3^ and {alpha}=-1.75+/-0.25. Above L_Ly{alpha}~=10^43^erg/s, the Ly{alpha} luminosity function becomes power-law like, driven by X-ray AGN. We find that Ly{alpha}-selected emitters have a high escape fraction of 37+/-7 per cent, anticorrelated with Ly{alpha} luminosity and correlated with Ly{alpha} equivalent width. Ly{alpha} emitters have ubiquitous large (~=40kpc) Ly{alpha} haloes, ~2 times larger than their H{alpha} extents. By directly comparing our Ly{alpha} and H{alpha} luminosity functions, we find that the global/overall escape fraction of Ly{alpha} photons (within a 13kpc radius) from the full population of star-forming galaxies is 5.1+/-0.2 per cent at the peak of the star formation history. An extra 3.3+/-0.3 per cent of Ly{alpha} photons likely still escape, but at larger radii.

Cone search capability for table J/MNRAS/466/1242/tablea2 (Catalogue of 440 candidate line emitters selected in COSMOS and UDS)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.74661242
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/466/1242
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/466/1242
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/466/1242
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/466/1242
Provenance
Creator Sobral D.; Matthee J.; Best P.; Stroe A.; Rottgering H.; Oteo I.; Smail I.,Morabito L.; Paulino-afonso A.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2020
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Interdisciplinary Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics