ZFIRE: A KECK/MOSFIRE SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF GALAXIES IN RICH ENVIRONMENTS AT z ∼ 2

Abstract

We present an overview and the first data release of ZFIRE, a spectroscopic redshift survey of starforming galaxies that utilizes the MOSFIRE instrument on Keck-I to study galaxy properties in rich environments at 1.5 < z < 2.5. ZFIRE measures accurate spectroscopic redshifts and basic galaxy properties derived from multiple emission lines. The galaxies are selected from a stellar mass limited sample based on deep near infrared imaging (K AB < 25) and precise photometric redshifts from the ZFOURGE and UKIDSS surveys as well as grism redshifts from 3DHST. Between 2013 and 2015 ZFIRE has observed the COSMOS and UDS legacy fields over 13 nights and has obtained 211 galaxy redshifts over 1.57 < z < 2.66 from a combination of nebular emission lines (such as Hα, [Nii], Hβ, [Sii]) observed at 1-2µm. Based on our medium-band near infra-red photometry, we are able to spectrophotometrically flux calibrate our spectra to ∼10% accuracy. ZFIRE reaches 5σ emission line flux limits of ∼3 × 10 −18 erg/s/cm 2 with a resolving power of R = 3500 and reaches masses down to ∼10 9 M . We confirm that the primary input survey, ZFOURGE, has produced photometric redshifts for star-forming galaxies (including highly attenuated ones) accurate to ∆z/(1+ z spec ) = 0.015 with 0.7% outliers. We measure a slight redshift bias of < 0.001, and we note that the redshift bias tends to be larger at higher masses. We also examine the role of redshift on the derivation of rest-frame colours and stellar population parameters from SED fitting techniques. The ZFIRE survey extends spectroscopically confirmed z ∼ 2 samples across a richer range of environments, here we make available the first public release of the data for use by the community. a

MOSEL Survey: Tracking the Growth of Massive Galaxies at 2 < z < 4 Using Kinematics and the IllustrisTNG Simulation

“…Thus, ZFOURGE survey reaches a photometric redshift accuracy of σ z = 0.016 in the redshift range 2.5 < z < 4.0 (Straatman et al 2016). The ZFIRE survey confirms the precision of the photometric redshift measurement of the ZFOURGE survey to σ z ∼ 2% (Nanayakkara et al 2016).…”

“…Possible active galactic nuclei (AGN) contaminants were removed using the Cowley et al (2016) catalog that uses X-ray, radio, and infrared imaging to identify AGNs in the ZFOURGE survey. The data was reduced using the MOS-FIRE data reduction pipeline 1 and flux calibration was performed using the ZFIRE data reduction pipeline (Tran et al 2015;Nanayakkara et al 2016).…”

“…The extensive ZFOURGE photometry Straatman et al (2016) provide us with fluxes in nearly 30 photometric bands for MOSEL galaxies. Figure 7 shows the recovered SFHs of the massive and low mass galaxies of our MOSEL sample in comparison with the ZFIRE sample Nanayakkara et al (2016). We have normalized the SFR with the recovered stellar mass of each galaxy.…”

ZFIRE: The Evolution of the Stellar Mass Tully–Fisher Relation to Redshift ∼2.2

“…We subsequently scaled the flux values to agree with the photometric K s -band magnitudes from the FourStar (Persson et al 2013) Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE; Straatman et al 2016), resulting in a final median uncertainty of 0.08 mag (see also Nanayakkara et al 2016).…”

Gemini Observations of Galaxies in Rich Early Environments (GOGREEN) I: survey description

“…Snyder et al 2012;Lotz et al 2013) or emission-line galaxies (e.g. Zeimann et al 2013;Nanayakkara et al 2016) in the most massive clusters (e.g. Nantais et al 2013;Martini et al 2013;Stanford et al 2014).…”