The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) survey design, reductions, and detections

Journal article

We describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the redshifts of over a million Lyα emitting galaxies between 1.88 < z < 3.52, in a 540 deg2 area encompassing a co-moving volume of 10.9 Gpc3. No pre-selection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%. We detail the project’s observational strategy, reduction pipeline, source detection, and catalog generation, and present initial results for science verification in the COSMOS, Extended Groth Strip, and GOODS-N fields. We demonstrate that our data reach the required specifications in throughput, astrometric accuracy, flux limit, and object detection, with the end products being a catalog of emission-line sources, their object classifications, and flux-calibrated spectra.

Authors: Gebhardt, K; Mentuch Cooper, E; Ciardullo, R; Jarvis, M; Et al.

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Astronomical Society
• Journal: Astrophysical Journal
• Volume: 923
• Issue: 2
• Article number: 217
• Publication date: 2021-12-23
• Acceptance date: 2021-10-07
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac2e03
• EISSN: 1538-4357
• ISSN: 0004-637X
• Language: English
• Keywords: emission line galaxies; cosmological parameters from large-scale structure; FFR; Lyman-alpha galaxies; redshift surveys