Stellar properties of z ~ 1 Lyman-break galaxies from ACS slitless grism spectra

TL;DR

This study analyzes low-redshift Lyman-break galaxies using HST ACS slitless grism spectra, revealing their young, star-forming, massive, and dusty nature, and highlighting similarities across redshifts.

Contribution

It demonstrates the benefits of combining photometric data from HST ACS slitless grism observations with spectral energy distribution fitting for low-redshift LBGs.

Findings

Low-redshift LBGs are young, star-forming, massive, and dusty.

Including ACS slitless grism photometry improves SED fitting.

Low- and high-redshift LBGs share similar properties.

Abstract

Lyman-break galaxies are now regularly found in the high redshift Universe by searching for the break in the galaxy spectrum caused by the Lyman-limit redshifted into the optical or even near-IR. At lower redshift, this break is covered by the GALEX UV channels and small samples of z ~ 1 LBGs have been presented in the literature. Here we give results from fitting the spectral energy distributions of a small sub-set of low redshift LBGs and demonstrate the advantage of including photometric points derived from HST ACS slitless grism observations. The results show these galaxies to have very young, star forming populations, while still being massive and dusty. LBGs at low and high redshift show remarkable similarities in their properties, indicating that the LBG selection method picks similar galaxies throughout the Universe.