Stellar Populations of Lyman-alpha Emitting Galaxies in the HETDEX Survey I: An Analysis of LAEs in the GOODS-N Field

Abstract

We present the results of a stellar-population analysis of Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies (LAES) in GOODS-N at 1.9 < z < 3.5 spectroscopically identified by the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). We provide a method for connecting emission-line detections from the blind spectroscopic survey to imaging counterparts, a crucial tool needed as HETDEX builds a massive database of ~1 million Lyman-alpha detections. Using photometric data spanning as many as 11 filters covering 0.4-4.5 microns from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, we study the objects' global properties and explore which properties impact the strength of Lyman-alpha emission. We measure a median stellar mass of 0.8 (^+2.9_-0.5) x 10^9 Msol and conclude that the physical properties of HETDEX spectroscopically-selected LAEs are comparable to LAEs selected by previous deep narrow band studies. We find that stellar mass and star formation rate correlate strongly with the Lyman-alpha equivalent width. We then use a known sample of z>7 LAEs to perform a proto-study of predicting Lyman-alpha emission from galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization, finding agreement at the 1-sigma level between prediction and observation for the majority of strong emitters.

29 pages, 22 figures, Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal

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• HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1: 220K Sources Including Over 50K Lyman Alpha Emitters from an Untargeted Wide-area Spectroscopic Survey
• Introducing the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyman Alpha (TESLA) Survey: Initial Study Correlating Galaxy Properties to Lyman-Alpha Emission
• Identifying Active Galactic Nuclei at $z\sim 3$ from the HETDEX Survey Using Machine Learning
• Galaxy populations in protoclusters at cosmic noon
• Identifying Lyα emitter candidates with Random Forest: learning from galaxies in CANDELS survey
• The miniJPAS & J-NEP surveys: Identification and characterization of the Ly$\alpha$ Emitter population and the Ly$\alpha$ Luminosity Function