The MUSE-Wide Survey: Survey Description and First Data Release

by Tanya Urrutia on November 19, 2018

New paper by T. Urrutia et al.  This is the first data release paper that describes the MUSE-Wide survey and the contents of this webpage. We describe the survey layout, its scientific goals and the data reduction of the MUSE-Wide data cubes. We then construct two catalogs: one emission line selected and one selected from HST photometry. In the context of redshift surveys, MUSE-Wide shows an incredibly efficient yield of identifications getting higher redshift densities than even the deepest MOS surveys in similar areas.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06549

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We present the MUSE-Wide survey, a blind, 3D spectroscopic survey in the CANDELS/GOODS-S and CANDELS/COSMOS regions. Each MUSE-Wide pointing has a depth of 1 hour and hence targets more extreme and more luminous objects over 10 times the area of the MUSE-Deep fields (Bacon et al. 2017). The legacy value of MUSE-Wide lies in providing “spectroscopy of everything” without photometric pre-selection. We describe the data reduction, post-processing and PSF characterization of the first 44 CANDELS/GOODS-S MUSE-Wide pointings released with this publication. Using a 3D matched filtering approach we detected 1,602 emission line sources, including 479 Lyman-α (Lya) emitting galaxies with redshifts 2.9≲z≲6.3. We cross-match the emission line sources to existing photometric catalogs, finding almost complete agreement in redshifts and stellar masses for our low redshift (z < 1.5) emitters. At high redshift, we only find ~55% matches to photometric catalogs. We encounter a higher outlier rate and a systematic offset of Δz≃0.2 when comparing our MUSE redshifts with photometric redshifts. Cross-matching the emission line sources with X-ray catalogs from the Chandra Deep Field South, we find 127 matches, including 10 objects with no prior spectroscopic identification. Stacking X-ray images centered on our Lya emitters yielded no signal; the Lya population is not dominated by even low luminosity AGN. A total of 9,205 photometrically selected objects from the CANDELS survey lie in the MUSE-Wide footprint, which we provide optimally extracted 1D spectra of. We are able to determine the spectroscopic redshift of 98% of 772 photometrically selected galaxies brighter than 24th F775W magnitude. All the data in the first data release – datacubes, catalogs, extracted spectra, maps – are available on the website https://musewide.aip.de.

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