The $z\sim 2$ $[\mathrm{O}\mathrm{III}]$ Luminosity Function of Grism-selected Emission-line Galaxies

Abstract

Upcoming missions such as Euclid and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will use emission-line selected galaxies to address a variety of questions in cosmology and galaxy evolution in the $z>1$ universe. The optimal observing strategy for these programs relies upon knowing the number of galaxies that will be found and the bias of the galaxy population. Here we measure the $[\mathrm{O}\mathrm{III}]\lambda 5007$ luminosity function for a vetted sample of 1951 $m_{\mathrm{J}+\mathrm{JH}+\mathrm{H}}<26$ galaxies with unambiguous redshifts between $1.90<z<2.35$, which were selected using HST/WFC3 G141 grism frames made available by the 3D-HST program. These systems are directly analogous to the galaxies that will be identified by the Euclid and Roman missions, which will utilize grism spectroscopy to find $[\mathrm{O}\mathrm{III}]\lambda 5007$-emitting galaxies at $0.8\lesssim z\lesssim 2.7$ and $1.7\lesssim z\lesssim 2.8$, respectively. We interpret our results in the context of the expected number counts for these upcoming missions. Finally, we combine our dust-corrected $[\mathrm{O}\mathrm{III}]$ luminosities with rest-frame ultraviolet star formation rates to present a new calibration of the SFR density associated with $1.90<z<2.35$ $[\mathrm{O}\mathrm{III}]$-emitting galaxies. We find that these grism-selected galaxies contain roughly half of the total star formation activity at $z\sim 2$.

16 pages, 11 figures, accepted to ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (2)

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• Lyα Halos around [O III]-Selected Galaxies in HETDEX