The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: Survey Design and First Data Release

TL;DR

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey aims to measure baryon acoustic oscillations using 240,000 distant emission line galaxies, providing detailed survey design, data, and galaxy properties, with a public data release for the first 100,000 galaxies.

Contribution

This paper details the survey design, data acquisition, and galaxy analysis methods, along with the first public data release, advancing large-scale structure studies and BAO measurements.

Findings

Survey will measure BAO scale to better than 2%

Galaxies are mostly extreme starburst and interacting systems

Public data release includes measurements for 100,000 galaxies

Abstract

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey is a survey of 240,000 emission line galaxies in the distant universe, measured with the AAOmega spectrograph on the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). The target galaxies are selected using ultraviolet photometry from the GALEX satellite, with a flux limit of NUV<22.8 mag. The redshift range containing 90% of the galaxies is 0.2<z<1.0. The primary aim of the survey is to precisely measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) imprinted on the spatial distribution of these galaxies at look-back times of 4-8 Gyrs. Detailed forecasts indicate the survey will measure the BAO scale to better than 2% and the tangential and radial acoustic wave scales to approximately 3% and 5%, respectively. This paper provides a detailed description of the survey and its design, as well as the spectroscopic observations, data reduction, and redshift measurement techniques employed. It also presents an analysis of the properties of the target galaxies, including emission line diagnostics which show that they are mostly extreme starburst galaxies, and Hubble Space Telescope images, which show they contain a high fraction of interacting or distorted systems. In conjunction with this paper, we make a public data release of data for the first 100,000 galaxies measured for the project.