Photometric properties of Ly alpha emitters at z=4.86 in the COSMOS 2 square degree field
astro-ph.CO
/ Authors
Y. Shioya, Y. Taniguchi, S. S. Sasaki, T. Nagao, T. Murayama, T. Saito, Y. Ideue, A. Nakajima, K. L. Matsuoka, J. Trump
and 16 more authors
N. Z. Scoville, D. B. Sanders, B. Mobasher, H. Aussel, P. Capak, J. Kartaltepe, A. Koekemoer, C. Carilli, R. S. Ellis, B. Garilli, M. Giavalisco, M. G. Kitzbichler, C. Impey, O. LeFevre, E. Schinnerer, V. Smolcic
/ Abstract
We present results of a survey for Ly alpha emitters at z=4.86 based on optical narrowband (lambda_c=7126 angstrom, Delta lambda=73 angstrom) and broadband (B, V, r', i', and z') observations of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) field using Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope. We find 79 LAE candidates at z=4.86 over a contiguous survey area of 1.83 deg^2, down to the Ly alpha line flux of 1.47 x 10^-17 ergs s^-1 cm^-2. We obtain the Ly alpha luminosity function with a best-fit Schechter parameters of log L^*=42.9^+0.5_-0.3 ergs s^-1 and phi^* = 1.2^+8.0_-1.1 x 10^-4 Mpc^-3 for alpha=-1.5 (fixed). The two-point correlation function for our LAE sample is xi(r) = (r/4.4^+5.7_-2.9 Mpc)^-1.90+/-0.22. In order to investigate the field-to-field variations of the properties of Ly alpha emitters, we divide the survey area into nine tiles of 0.5^circ x 0.5^circ each. We find that the number density varies with a factor of ~ 2 from field to field with high statistical significance. However, we find no significant field-to-field variance when we divide the field into four tiles with 0.7^circ x 0.7^circ each. We conclude that at least 0.5 deg^2 survey area is required to derive averaged properties of LAEs at z~5, and our survey field is wide enough to overcome the cosmic variance.