Deep Observations of Lyman Break Galaxies

Abstract

We summarise the main results of recent work on the Lyman break galaxy population which takes advantage of newly commissioned instrumentation on the VLT and Keck telescopes to push the detection of these objects to new wavelengths and more sensitive limits. We focus in particular on near-infrared observations targeted at detecting emission lines of [O II], [O III], and H-beta and on the first tentative detection of Lyman continuum emission from star forming galaxies at z = 3.

9 pages, LaTeX, 6 Postscript Figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the ESO Symposium: Deep Fields, ed. S. Cristiani (Berlin: Springer)