Keck-I MOSFIRE Spectroscopy of the z ~ 12 Candidate Galaxy UDFj-39546284
Abstract
We report the results of deep (4.6 hr) H-band spectroscopy of the well studied z ~ 12 H-band dropout galaxy candidate UDFj-39546284 with MOSFIRE on Keck-I. These data reach a sensitivity of 5-10 × 10^(–19) erg s^(–1) cm^(–2) per 4.4 Å resolution element between sky lines. Previous papers have argued that this source could either be a large equivalent width line emitting galaxy at 2 < z < 3.5 or a luminous galaxy at z ~ 12. We find a 2.2σ peak associated with a line candidate in deep Hubble Space Telescope Wide-Field Camera 3 Infrared grism observations, but at a lower flux than expected. After considering several possibilities, we conclude these data cannot conclusively confirm or reject the previous line detection, and significantly deeper spectroscopic observations are required. We also search for low-redshift emission lines in 10 other 7 < z < 10 z, Y, and J-dropout candidates in our mask and find no significant detections.
Additional Information
© 2013 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 June 10; accepted 2013 July 12; published 2013 July 29. The data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. We acknowledge the support of the Keck Observatory staff who made these observations possible and the valuable feedback from Janice Lee and Masami Ouchi while preparing this draft. We also thank Nick Konidaris for providing and supporting the MOSFIRE reduction pipeline and Gwen Rude for providing the MOSFIRE exposure time calculator. A.F. and S.T. acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation; A.F. also thanks Caltech for hospitality while this article was prepared. The authors recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Facility: Keck:I (MOSFIRE)Attached Files
Published - 2041-8205_773_1_L14.pdf
Submitted - 1307.4089v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 41060
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130903-131308765
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- Created
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2013-09-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- COSMOS