The AstroSat UV Deep Field North: the far and near ultraviolet photometric catalog

TL;DR

This paper presents deep ultraviolet imaging of the GOODS-N field with AstroSat/UVIT, creating a comprehensive UV source catalog that enhances understanding of galaxy properties and Lyman continuum leakers at various redshifts.

Contribution

The study provides the first deep UV photometric catalog of the GOODS-N field using AstroSat/UVIT, including source detection, photometry, and analysis of UV sky background.

Findings

Detected over 16,000 sources in NUV and over 6,800 in FUV.

Achieved 3σ detection limits around 27 AB magnitude in all filters.

Constructed PSFs with approximately 1.2 arcsecond FWHM.

Abstract

We present deep UV imaging observations of the Great Observatories Origins Survey Northern (GOODS-N) field with AstroSat/UVIT (AstroSat UV Deep Field north - AUDFn), using one far-UV (F154W, 34.0 kilosec) and two near-UV filters (N242W, 19.2 kilosec; N245M, 15.5 kilosec). The nature of the UV sky background was explored across the UVIT field and a global mean and rms was estimated for each filter. We reach 3$\sigma$ detection limits of $m_{\rm AB}$ $\sim$ 27.35 mag, 27.28 mag and 27.02 mag for a point source in the F154W, N242W and N245M bands respectively. The 50\% completeness limits of the FUV and NUV images are $m_{\rm AB}=$ 26.40 mag and 27.05 mag respectively. We constructed PSFs for each band and estimated their FWHM, which were found to be almost the same: 1.18" in F154W, 1.11" in N242W, and 1.24" in N245M. We used SExtractor to separately identify sources in the FUV and NUV filters and produce the UV source catalog of the entire AUDFn field. The source count slope estimated in FUV and NUV is 0.57 dex mag$^{-1}$ (between 19 - 25 mag) and 0.44 dex mag$^{-1}$ (between 18 - 25 mag), respectively. The catalog contains 6839 and 16171 sources (brighter than the 50\% completeness limit) in the FUV and NUV, respectively. Our FUV and NUV flux measurements of the identified sources complement existing multi-band data in the GOODS-N field, and enable us to probe rest-frame FUV properties of galaxies at redshift $z < 1$ and search for candidate Lyman continuum leakers at redshift $z > 0.97$.