CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey
Abstract
The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) is designed to document the first third of galactic evolution, over the approximate redshift (z) range 8-1.5. It will image >250,000 distant galaxies using three separate cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope, from the mid-ultraviolet to the near-infrared, and will find and measure Type Ia supernovae at z > 1.5 to test their accuracy as standardizable candles for cosmology. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are selected, each with extensive ancillary data. The use of five widely separated fields mitigates cosmic variance and yields statistically robust and complete samples of galaxies down to a stellar mass of 10^9 M_☉ to z ≈ 2, reaching the knee of the ultraviolet luminosity function of galaxies to z ≈ 8. The survey covers approximately 800 arcmin^2 and is divided into two parts. The CANDELS/Deep survey (5σ point-source limit H = 27.7 mag) covers ~125 arcmin^2 within Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS)-N and GOODS-S. The CANDELS/Wide survey includes GOODS and three additional fields (Extended Groth Strip, COSMOS, and Ultra-deep Survey) and covers the full area to a 5σ point-source limit of H ≳ 27.0 mag. Together with the Hubble Ultra Deep Fields, the strategy creates a three-tiered "wedding-cake" approach that has proven efficient for extragalactic surveys. Data from the survey are nonproprietary and are useful for a wide variety of science investigations. In this paper, we describe the basic motivations for the survey, the CANDELS team science goals and the resulting observational requirements, the field selection and geometry, and the observing design. The Hubble data processing and products are described in a companion paper.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 May 18. Accepted 2011 November 5. Published 2011 December 6. he authors thank the anonymous referee for helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript. We thank our Program Coordinators, Tricia Royle and Beth Perriello, along with the rest of the Hubble planning team, for their efforts to schedule this challenging program. The WFC3 team has made substantial contributions to the program by calibrating and characterizing the instrument and has provided much useful advice. Rychard Bouwens gave helpful input on the observing strategy for the CANDELS/Deep survey. John Mackenty suggested using 2 × 2 on-chip binning for the UV observations, which significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio of those observations. The CANDELS observations would not have been possible without the contributions of hundreds of other individuals to the Hubble missions and the development and installation of new instruments. Support for HST Programs GO-12060 and GO-12099 was provided by NASA through grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A. Fontana acknowledges support from agreement ASI-INAF I/009/10/0. Facilities: HST (WFC3) - Hubble Space Telescope satelliteAttached Files
Published - Grogin_2011_ApJS_197_35.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 76532
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170412-091720750
- NASA
- GO-12060
- NASA
- GO-12099
- NASA
- NAS5-26555
- Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI)
- I/009/10/0
- Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF)
- Created
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2017-04-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)