Photometric Redshifts Using Galaxy Image Structure

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Scientific paper

Spectroscopic redshifts of faint galaxies require large telescopes and considerable observing time. However, Connolly et al (1995) have shown that broadband photometry in UB_JR_FI_N bands can be used to estimate redshifts to an accuracy of Delta z ~ 0.05 to B_J ~ 22.5 and z ~ 0.5. The accuracy is expected to improve by at least a factor of two with more precise photometry, and the technique can be extended to higher redshift with deeper spectroscopic training sets. Application of this photometric redshift technique represents a 30--fold increase in observing efficiency over multi--fiber spectrographs to this depth. The efficiency increases steeply at fainter magnitudes because of the increasing surface-density of galaxies. We show that the photometric redshift technique can be improved even further by including image structure characteristics as well. After binning a sample by a redshift--independent concentration index, photometric redshifts derived from just B,R and the log of the apparent size theta have dispersions (Delta z) comparable to the four-band fit. This success is due to the strong correlations of apparent surface-brightness with redshift, and rest-frame color to image-concentration. U and I band CCD images require 80% of the observing time to reach the same S/N as B and R for typical galaxy colors. By eliminating the need for these bands, the photometric redshift technique improves in efficiency by another factor of ~ 5, or a net ~ 150--fold improvement over spectroscopic redshifts to B_J=22.5. We discuss one way of exploiting photometric redshift technique to select volume--limited samples of field galaxies. Such samples are particularly well suited for studying the faint end of the luminosity function.

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