The Arizona CDFS Environment Survey (ACES): A Magellan/IMACS Spectroscopic Survey of the Chandra Deep Field South

TL;DR

The ACES spectroscopic survey of the Chandra Deep Field South provides extensive redshift data, enhancing the understanding of galaxy environments at z < 1 and evaluating photometric redshift accuracy.

Contribution

This work presents a comprehensive spectroscopic redshift survey that significantly improves spatial coverage and sampling density in the CDFS, enabling detailed environment studies at z < 1.

Findings

Increased redshift coverage of the CDFS field.

Assessment of photometric redshift accuracy.

Enhanced data for galaxy environment analysis.

Abstract

We present the Arizona CDFS Environment Survey (ACES), a recently-completed spectroscopic redshift survey of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) conducted using IMACS on the Magellan-Baade telescope. In total, the survey targeted 7277 unique sources down to a limiting magnitude of R = 24.1, yielding 5080 secure redshifts across the ~30' x 30' extended CDFS region. The ACES dataset delivers a significant increase to both the spatial coverage and the sampling density of the spectroscopic observations in the field. Combined with previously-published, spectroscopic redshifts, ACES now creates a highly-complete survey of the galaxy population at R < 23, enabling the local galaxy density (or environment) on relatively small scales (~1 Mpc) to be measured at z < 1 in one of the most heavily-studied and data-rich fields in the sky. Here, we describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the survey and present a preliminary redshift and environment catalog. In addition, we utilize the ACES spectroscopic redshift catalog to assess the quality of photometric redshifts from both the COMBO-17 and MUSYC imaging surveys of the CDFS.