Emission-Line Galaxies from the HST PEARS Grism Survey I: The South Fields

TL;DR

This study identifies and analyzes emission-line galaxies in the HST PEARS South Fields, providing new spectroscopic redshifts, star-formation rates, and insights into the properties of HII regions at intermediate redshifts.

Contribution

It presents a novel 2D detection method for emission-line galaxies in grism data and reports 118 new spectroscopic redshifts in the GOODS-South field.

Findings

Detected 320 emission lines from 226 galaxy knots

Found many ELGs with high [OIII]/H-beta ratios

Identified giant star-forming regions at z~0.1-0.5

Abstract

We present results of a search for emission-line galaxies in the Southern Fields of the Hubble Space Telescope PEARS (Probing Evolution And Reionization Spectroscopically) grism survey. The PEARS South Fields consist of five ACS pointings (including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field) with the G800L grism for a total of 120 orbits, revealing thousands of faint object spectra in the GOODS-South region of the sky. Emission-line galaxies (ELGs) are one subset of objects that are prevalent among the grism spectra. Using a 2-dimensional detection and extraction procedure, we find 320 emission lines orginating from 226 galaxy "knots'' within 192 individual galaxies. Line identification results in 118 new grism-spectroscopic redshifts for galaxies in the GOODS-South Field. We measure emission line fluxes using standard Gaussian fitting techniques. At the resolution of the grism data, the H-beta and [OIII] doublet are blended. However, by fitting two Gaussian components to the H-beta and [OIII] features, we find that many of the PEARS ELGs have high [OIII]/H-beta ratios compared to other galaxy samples of comparable luminosities. The star-formation rates (SFRs) of the ELGs are presented, as well as a sample of distinct giant star-forming regions at z~0.1-0.5 across individual galaxies. We find that the radial distances of these HII regions in general reside near the galaxies' optical continuum half-light radii, similar to those of giant HII regions in local galaxies.