HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1: 220K Sources Including Over 50K Lyman Alpha Emitters from an Untargeted Wide-area Spectroscopic Survey

TL;DR

The HETDEX public source catalog provides a comprehensive list of over 220,000 astronomical sources, including 50,000+ Ly-alpha emitters, from a wide-area spectroscopic survey aimed at cosmological measurements.

Contribution

This work presents the first public release of a large, spectroscopically confirmed catalog of emission-line and continuum sources from the HETDEX survey, including detailed spectral and classification data.

Findings

Catalog includes 51,863 Ly-alpha emitters and 123,891 OII emitters.

Redshifts agree with external catalogs within Δz < 0.02 for 96.1% of sources.

Only 55.5% of LAEs have detectable r-band counterparts, indicating many are faint or line-dominated.

Abstract

We present the first publicly released catalog of sources obtained from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX is an integral field spectroscopic survey designed to measure the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance at 1.88<z<3.52 by using the spatial distribution of more than a million Ly-alpha-emitting galaxies over a total target area of 540 deg^2. The catalog comes from contiguous fiber spectra coverage of 25 deg^2 of sky from January 2017 through June 2020, where object detection is performed through two complementary detection methods: one designed to search for line emission and the other a search for continuum emission. The HETDEX public release catalog is dominated by emission-line galaxies and includes 51,863 Ly{\alpha}-emitting galaxy (LAE) identifications and 123,891 OII-emitting galaxies at z<0.5. Also included in the catalog are 37,916 stars, 5274 low-redshift (z<0.5) galaxies without emission lines, and 4976 active galactic nuclei. The catalog provides sky coordinates, redshifts, line identifications, classification information, line fluxes, OII and Ly-alpha line luminosities where applicable, and spectra for all identified sources processed by the HETDEX detection pipeline. Extensive testing demonstrates that HETDEX redshifts agree to within deltaz < 0.02, 96.1% of the time to those in external spectroscopic catalogs. We measure the photometric counterpart fraction in deep ancillary Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging and find that only 55.5% of the LAE sample has an r-band continuum counterpart down to a limiting magnitude of r~26.2 mag (AB) indicating that an LAE search of similar sensitivity with photometric pre-selection would miss nearly half of the HETDEX LAE catalog sample. Data access and details about the catalog can be found online at http://hetdex.org/.