We present the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyα (TESLA), a spectroscopic survey in the 10 deg2 of the Euclid North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) field. Using TESLA, we study how the physical properties of Lyα emitters (LAEs) correlate with Lyα emission to understand the escape of Lyα emission from galaxies at redshifts of 2–3.5. We present an analysis of 43 LAEs performed in the NEP field using early data from the TESLA survey. We use Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging in the grizy bands, Spitzer/IRAC channels 1 and 2 from the Hawaii 20 deg2 (H20) survey, and spectra acquired by the Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) on the Hobby–Eberly Telescope. We perform spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to compute the galaxy properties of 43 LAEs, and study correlations between stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), and dust to the Lyα rest-frame equivalent width (WLyα). We uncover marginal (1σ significance) correlations between stellar mass and WLyα, and SFR and WLyα, with a Spearman correlation coefficient of −0.34_(−.14)^(+.17) and −0.37_(−.14)^(+.16), respectively. We show that the WLyα distribution of the 43 LAEs is consistent with being drawn from an exponential distribution with an e-folding scale of W0 = 150 Å. Once complete the TESLA survey will enable the study of ≳50,000 LAEs to explore more correlations between galaxy properties and WLyα. The large sample size will allow the construction of a predictive model for WLyα as a function of SED-derived galaxy properties, which could be used to improve Lyα-based constraints on reionization.
Introducing the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyα (TESLA) Survey: Initial Study Correlating Galaxy Properties to Lyα Emission
- Creators
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Chávez Ortiz, Óscar A.
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Finkelstein, Steven L.
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Davis, Dustin
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Leung, Gene
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Mentuch Cooper, Erin
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Bagley, Micaela
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Larson, Rebecca
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Casey, Caitlin M.
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McCarron, Adam P.
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Gebhardt, Karl
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Guo, Yuchen
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Liu, Chenxu
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Laseter, Isaac
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Rhodes, Jason
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Bender, Ralf
- Fabricius, Max
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Sánchez, Ariel G.
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Scarlata, Claudia
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Capak, Peter1
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Zalesky, Lukas
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Sanders, David
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Szapudi, Istvan
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Baxter, Eric
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McPartland, Conor
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Weaver, John R.
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Toft, Sune
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Mobasher, Bahram
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Suzuki, Nao
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Chartab, Nima
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1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
This research is based [in part] on data collected at the Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. We are honored and grateful for the opportunity of observing the universe from Maunakea, which has cultural, historical, and natural significance in Hawaii.
O.C.O. thanks James Derry for his insight in making my big data algorithms more automated and his Python guidance as this project progressed.
O.C.O., S.L.F., and G.L. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation through grant AST-1908817 and NASA through grant 80NSSC22K0489.
O.C.O. thanks the University of Texas at Austin and the Dean's Mentoring Fellowship for additional support.
The observations were obtained with the Hobby–Eberly Telescope (HET), which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munchen, and Georg-August-University at Gottingen.
The HET is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly.
VIRUS is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, Leibniz-Institut fur Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Texas A&M University (TAMU), Max-Planck Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit at Munchen, Pennsylvania State University, Institut fur Astrophysik Gottingen, University of Oxford, and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik (MPA).
The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing high-performance computing, visualization, and storage resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper.
The Cosmic Dawn Center is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant No. 140.
We also want to acknowledge that we did this work at an institution, the University of Texas at Austin, that sits on indigenous land. The Tonkawa live in central Texas and the Comanche and Apache move through this area. We pay respect to all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who are a part of these lands and territories in Texas. We are grateful to be able to live, work, collaborate, and learn on this piece of Turtle Island.
Software References
Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), Numpy (Harris et al. 2020), Pandas (pandas development team 2020), Scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), and EAZY (Brammer et al. 2008)
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1908817
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC22K0489
- The University of Texas at Austin
- Texas Advanced Computing Center
- Danish National Research Foundation
- 140
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)