Simulating properties of emission line galaxies from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Abstract

We simulate the emission line galaxy properties for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by creating a 4 deg² galaxy mock catalog using Galacticus, a semi-analytic model (SAM) for galaxy formation and evolution. The simulated galaxy properties include emission line luminosity, equivalent width (EW), broad band photometry, and spectral energy distribution (SED). We compare this mock catalog with the latest observational data from WISP and MOSDEF. We find that our Galacticus model makes predictions consistent with observational data, over a wide redshift range for multiple emission lines. We use this validated galaxy mock catalog to forecast the photometric completeness of Hα and [OIII] emission lines as a function of line flux cut and H band magnitdue cut, for both Roman and Euclid-like surveys. Our prediction for the photometric completeness of a Euclid-like survey is in good agreement with previous work based on WISP data. Our predictions for the photometric completeness of possible implementations of the Roman High Latitude Wide Area Spectroscopic Survey (HLWASS) provides key input for the planning of such a survey. We find that at H = 24, a Euclid-like survey to the line flux limit of 2 × 10⁻¹⁶ erg/s/cm² is 97% complete, while a Roman HLWASS to the line flux limit of 10⁻¹⁶ erg/s/cm² is only 94.6% complete (it becomes 98% complete at H = 25).