Published in

Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 4(491), p. 5277-5286, 2019

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz3416

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Identifying reionization-epoch galaxies with extreme levels of Lyman continuum leakage in James Webb Space Telescope surveys

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Postprint: archiving allowed
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Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRSpec instrument will allow rest-frame ultraviolet/optical spectroscopy of galaxies in the epoch of reionization (EoR). Some galaxies may exhibit significant leakage of hydrogen-ionizing photons into the intergalactic medium, resulting in faint nebular emission lines. We present a machine learning framework for identifying cases of very high hydrogen-ionizing photon escape from galaxies based on the data quality expected from potential NIRSpec observations of EoR galaxies in lensed fields. We train our algorithm on mock samples of JWST/NIRSpec data for galaxies at redshifts z = 6–10. To make the samples more realistic, we combine synthetic galaxy spectra based on cosmological galaxy simulations with observational noise relevant for z ≳ 6 objects of a brightness similar to EoR galaxy candidates uncovered in Frontier Fields observations of galaxy cluster Abell-2744 and MACS-J0416. We find that ionizing escape fractions (fesc) of galaxies brighter than mAB,1500 ≈ 27 mag may be retrieved with mean absolute error Δfesc ≈ 0.09(0.12) for 24 h (1.5 h) JWST/NIRSpec exposures at resolution R = 100. For 24 h exposure time, even fainter galaxies (mAB,1500 < 28.5 mag) can be processed with Δfesc ≈ 0.14. This framework simultaneously estimates the redshift of these galaxies with a relative error less than 0.03 for both 24 (mAB,1500 < 28.5 mag) and 1.5 h (mAB,1500 < 27 mag) exposure times. We also consider scenarios where just a minor fraction of galaxies attain high fesc and present the conditions required for detecting a subpopulation of high-fesc galaxies within the data set.

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