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Published March 1, 2018 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: final data release and the metallicity of UV-luminous galaxies

Abstract

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey measured the redshifts of over 200 000 ultraviolet (UV)-selected (NUV < 22.8 mag) galaxies on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The survey detected the baryon acoustic oscillation signal in the large-scale distribution of galaxies over the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.0, confirming the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe and measuring the rate of structure growth within it. Here, we present the final data release of the survey: a catalogue of 225 415 galaxies and individual files of the galaxy spectra. We analyse the emission-line properties of these UV-luminous Lyman-break galaxies by stacking the spectra in bins of luminosity, redshift, and stellar mass. The most luminous (−25mag < M_(FUV) < −22mag) galaxies have very broad Hβ emission from active nuclei, as well as a broad second component to the [O III] (495.9 nm, 500.7 nm) doublet lines that is blueshifted by 100 km s^(−1) , indicating the presence of gas outflows in these galaxies. The composite spectra allow us to detect and measure the temperature-sensitive [O III] (436.3 nm) line and obtain metallicities using the direct method. The metallicities of intermediate stellar mass (8.8 < log (M*/M⊙) < 10) WiggleZ galaxies are consistent with normal emission-line galaxies at the same masses. In contrast, the metallicities of high stellar mass (10 < log (M*/M⊙) < 12) WiggleZ galaxies are significantly lower than for normal emission-line galaxies at the same masses. This is not an effect of evolution as the metallicities do not vary with redshift; it is most likely a property specific to the extremely UV-luminous WiggleZ galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2017 November 14. Received 2017 October 19; in original form 2016 October 19. Published: 21 November 2017. This project would not be possible without the superb AAOmega/2dF facility provided by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. We wish to thank all the AAO staff for their support, especially the night assistants, support astronomers, and Russell Cannon (who greatly assisted with the quality control of the 2dF system). We also wish to thank Heinz Andernach for feedback on this manuscript; Alejandro Dubrovsky for writing software used to check the guide star and blank sky positions; Maksym Bernyk, David Barnes, and Rod Harris for help with the data base construction; Peter Jensen for assistance with the redshift measurements; and Michael Stanley for help with the selection of new GALEX positions. We thank the referee for many suggestions which have improved the manuscript. We wish to acknowledge financial support from The Australian Research Council (grants DP0772084, DP1093738, and LX0881951 directly for the WiggleZ project, and grant LE0668442 for programming support), Swinburne University of Technology, The University of Queensland, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, and The Gregg Thompson Dark Energy Travel Fund. MJD thanks the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and University of Western Australia for travel support. SB acknowledges funding support from the Australian Research Council through a Future Fellowship (FT140101166). GALEX is a NASA Small Explorer, launched in 2003 April. We gratefully acknowledge NASA's support for construction, operation, and science analysis for the GALEX mission, developed in cooperation with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of France and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS website is http://www.sdss.org/. The RCS2 survey is based on observations obtained with MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of the CFHT and CEA/DAPNIA, at the CFHT which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers of France, and the University of Hawaii. The RCS2 survey is supported by grants to HKCY from the Canada Research Chair program and the Discovery program of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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