Spectroscopic Survey of the Distant Universe

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AST 95-29098 PI: Sandra Faber Spectroscopic Surveys of the Distant Universe Current spectroscopic surveys of distant galaxies are now probing down to 22 magnitude in the I wavelength band (in the infrared). However, the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is providing images yielding morphology and photometry down to I = 26, or 40 times fainter. Lack of spectra on these very faint galaxies limits the amount of information available from the HST images. To close the gap, two separate but parallel spectroscopic surveys are planned, using the 10-m Keck I telescope and its LRIS spectrograph. The first survey, comprising Phase I of the DEEP (Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe) Project, will be of about 600 distant field galaxies; the other will be of about 400 high-redshift galaxies in nine clusters. The data will be used in concert with Hubble images to catalog the galactic content of the distant Universe between z ~ 0.5 and 1.0, and use this comparison to characterize the nature of galactic evolution over roughly the latter half of the lifetime of the Universe. A public archive of all the data taken under the aegis of this proposal, both spectroscopic and imaging, will be made available electronically after a two-year proprietary period.