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28 March 2024
 
  » arxiv » 1104.2900

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Detections of Faint Lyman-alpha Emitters at z = 5.7: Galaxy Building Blocks and Engines of Reionization
Alan Dressler ; Crystal L. Martin ; Alaina Henry ; Marcin Sawicki ; Patrick McCarthy ;
Date 14 Apr 2011
AbstractWe report results of a unprecedentedly deep, blind search for Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) at z = 5.75 using IMACS, the Inamori-Magellan Areal Camera & Spectrograph, with the goal of identifying missing sources of reionization that could also be basic building blocks for today’s L* galaxies. We describe how improvements in wide field imaging with the Baade telescope, upgrades to IMACS, and the accumulation of ~20 hours of integration per field in excellent seeing led to the detection of single-emission-line sources as faint as F ~ 2 x 10^{-18} ergs s^{-1} cm^{-2}, a sensitivity 5 times deeper than our first search (Martin et al. 2008). Making reasonable corrections for foreground interlopers, we find a steep rise in the number counts of LAEs in our 110 sq arcmin survey area, from n ~ 16 at F = 10^{-17.0} ergs s^{-1} cm^{-2} to n ~ 122 at F = 10^{-17.6} (2.5 x 10^{-18} ergs s^{-1} cm^{-2}. At this flux the putative LAEs have reached a surface density of ~1 per sq arcminute -- a comoving volume density of 4 x 10^{-3} Mpc^{-3}, several times the density of L* galaxies today. The Lyman-continuum flux from these LAEs should be approaching the critical flux density required to complete reionization at this epoch, using conservative assumptions about neutral-gas clumpiness, and Lyman-alpha and Lyman-continuum escape fractions. Such faint LAEs are good candidates for building blocks of stellar mass ~10^{8-9} Msun for the young galaxies of this epoch.
Source arXiv, 1104.2900
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