Lyman Alpha-emitting Galaxies at z = 2.1: Characterizing the Progenitors of Typical Present-day Galaxies

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We discovered a sample of 261 Lyman alpha emitting (LAE) galaxies at z=2.1 in an ultra-deep 3727A narrow-band MUSYC image of the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South. LAEs were selected to have rest-frame equivalent widths >20A and emission line fluxes >3.7x10-17 ergs/cm2/s, corresponding to L_Lya>1.2x1042 ergs/s. 3% of the original candidates were detected in X-rays by Chandra, and 7% were detected in the rest-frame far-UV by GALEX; these objects were eliminated to minimize contamination by AGN and low-redshift galaxies. Our sample has median rest-frame EW=40A, and only a few galaxies have rest-frame EW bigger than 200A. Our results show that the luminosity function of LAEs at z=2.1 is consistent with that of LAEs at z=3.1 but with number density a factor of 1.8+-0.3 higher. We used the rest frame UV luminosity to estimate a median star formation rate of 4 Msun/yr. Clustering analysis reveals that LAEs at z=2.1 have r0=3+-0.5 Mpc, corresponding to b=1.0+-0.2, the lowest clustering bias of any high-redshift galaxy population. This implies that z=2.1 LAEs reside in dark matter halos with masses 1010 Msun, which are the lowest-mass halos yet probed at this redshift. We used the Sheth-Tormen conditional mass function to study the descendants of these LAEs and found that their typical present-day descendants are local galaxies with sub-L* and L* luminosities, like the Milky Way.
We gratefully acknowledge grant support for this research from NSF, DOE, and NASA.

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