The NEWFIRM Medium-Band Survey: Filter Definitions and First Results

Details The NEWFIRM Medium-Band Survey: Filter Definitions and First Results The NEWFIRM Medium-Band Survey: Filter Definitions and First Results

2009-01-05

arxiv.org/abs/0901.0551v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

Accepted for publication in PASP. 9 pages, 5 figures

Scientific paper

Deep near-infrared imaging surveys allow us to select and study distant galaxies in the rest-frame optical, and have transformed our understanding of the early Universe. As the vast majority of K- or IRAC-selected galaxies is too faint for spectroscopy, the interpretation of these surveys relies almost exclusively on photometric redshifts determined from fitting templates to the broad-band photometry. The best-achieved accuracy of these redshifts Delta(z)/(1+z) ~ 0.06 at z>1.5, which is sufficient for determining the broad characteristics of the galaxy population but not for measuring accurate rest-frame colors, stellar population parameters, or the local galaxy density. We have started a near-infrared imaging survey with the NEWFIRM camera on the Kitt Peak 4m telescope to greatly improve the accuracy of photometric redshifts in the range 1.51.5 in the COSMOS and AEGIS fields. The filter set also enables efficient selection of exotic objects such as high redshift quasars, galaxies dominated by emission lines, and very cool brown dwarfs; we show that late T and candidate "Y" dwarfs could be identified using only two of the filters.

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