1305.1399 (James W. Colbert et al.)

Predicting Future Space Near-IR Grism Surveys using the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels Survey    [PDF]

James W. Colbert, Harry Teplitz, Hakim Atek, Andrew Bunker, Marc Rafelski, Nathaniel Ross, Claudia Scarlata, Alejandro Bedregal, Alberto Dominguez, Alan Dressler, Alaina Henry, Matt Malkan, Crystal L. Martin, Dan Masters, Patrick McCarthy, Brian Siana

We present near-infrared emission line counts and luminosity functions from the HST WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels (WISP) program for 29 fields observed using both the G102 and G141 grism. Altogether we identify 1048 emission line galaxies with observed equivalent widths greater than 40 Angstroms, 467 of which have multiple detected emission lines. The WISP survey is sensitive to fainter flux levels (3-5x10^{-17} ergs/s/cm^2) than the future space near-infrared grism missions aimed at baryonic acoustic oscillation cosmology (1-4x10^{-16} ergs/s/cm^2), allowing us to probe the fainter emission line galaxies that the shallower future surveys may miss. Cumulative number counts of 0.7View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1399