1207.6639 (Pablo G. Perez-Gonzalez et al.)

SHARDS: an optical spectro-photometric survey of distant galaxies    [PDF]

Pablo G. Perez-Gonzalez, Antonio Cava, Guillermo Barro, Victor Villar, Nicolas Cardiel, Ignacio Ferreras, Jose Miguel Rodriguez-Espinosa, Almudena Alonso-Herrero, Marc Balcells, Javier Cenarro, Jordi Cepa, Stephane Charlot, Andrea Cimatti, Christopher J. Conselice, Emmanuele Daddi, Jennifer Donley, David Elbaz, Nestor Espino, Jesus Gallego, R. Gobat, Omaira Gonzalez-Martin, Rafael Guzman, Antonio Hernan-Caballero, Casiana Muñoz-Tuñon, Alvio Renzini, Javier Rodriguez Zaurin, Laurence Tresse, Ignacio Trujillo, Jaime Zamorano

(Abridged) We present the Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources (SHARDS), an ESO/GTC Large Program carried out with GTC/OSIRIS. SHARDS is an ultra-deep optical spectro-photometric survey of the GOODS-N field (130 arcmin^2) at wavelengths 500 to 950 nm and using 24 contiguous medium-band filters (spectral resolution R 50). The data reach 26.5 mag (>3-sigma level) with sub-arcsec seeing in all bands. SHARDS main goal is obtaining accurate physical properties of interm- and high-z galaxies using well-sampled optical SEDs with sufficient spectral resolution to measure absorption and emission features. Among the different populations of high-z galaxies, SHARDS principal targets are massive quiescent galaxies at z>1. In this paper, we outline the observational strategy and include a detailed discussion of the special reduction and calibration procedures applied to the GTC/OSIRIS data. We present science demonstration results about the detection and study of emission-line galaxies (star-forming and AGN) at z=0-5. We also analyze the SEDs for a sample of 27 quiescent massive galaxies at 1.0View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.6639