Keck Spectroscopy of Faint 3<z<7 Lyman Break Galaxies:- II. A High Fraction of Line Emitters at Redshift Six

Details Keck Spectroscopy of Faint 3<z<7 Lyman Break Galaxies:- II. A High Fraction of Line Emitters at Redshift Six Keck Spectroscopy of Faint 3<z<7 Lyman Break Galaxies:- II. A High Fraction of Line Emitters at Redshift Six

2010-09-28

arxiv.org/abs/1009.5471v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJL

Scientific paper

As Lyman-alpha photons are scattered by neutral hydrogen, a change with redshift in the Lyman-alpha equivalent width distribution of distant galaxies offers a promising probe of the degree of ionization in the intergalactic medium and hence when cosmic reionization ended. This simple test is complicated by the fact that Lyman-alpha emission can also be affected by the evolving astrophysical details of the host galaxies. In the first paper in this series, we demonstrated both a luminosity and redshift dependent trend in the fraction of Lyman-alpha emitters seen within color-selected Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) over the range 325 A) emission, an increase of 1.6x from a similar sample observed at z~4. With a total sample of 74 z~6 LBGs, we determine the luminosity-dependent Lyman-alpha equivalent width distribution. Assuming continuity in these trends to the new population of z~7 sources located with the Hubble WFC3/IR camera, we predict that unless the neutral fraction rises in the intervening 200 Myr, the success rate for spectroscopic confirmation using Lyman-alpha emission should be high.

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