GALEX-SDSS photometric redshifts

Sébastien Heinis, Stéphane Arnouts, Tamás Budavári ...

sebastien@pha.jhu.edu

NOTE: These photometric redshifts mainly give a statistical information; they should be considered with caution when used on an individual object basis.


The sample

We use here MIS fields from IR1.1 (687 fields in total); we refer to this dataset hereafter, unless otherwise stated.

These photometric redshifts have been computed on all MIS GALEX sources with a SDSS counterpart with the following restriction:

In the following, figures use:

            dered_fuv = fuv_mag - 8.24*e_bv
            dered_fuv = nuv_mag - (8.20*e_bv  -0.62*e_bv*e_bv)

unless otherwise stated.

There are 592 fields with SDSS overlap, and 589 with SDSS overlap with sources within 0.5 deg of the center. Here is the list of the 589 fields, giving for each field:


The method

Since a fraction (588/687) of the IR1.1 MIS fields do not have FUV observations, in order to be homogeneous, the present photometric redshift estimation uses 6 bands: the NUV GALEX band and the u, g, r, i, and z SDSS bands.

We use here the combination of two different methods:

We used here the following templates:



We refer hereafter to these methods by lephare and polyfit respectively. We present the different steps of the method in the following sections

1. Calibration of the redshift-magnitude relation

The first step consists to calibrate a redshift-apparent magnitude relation based on the SDSS spectroscopic counterparts. We use the 6 bands (NUV, u, g, r, i, z) and the spectroscopic redshift of SDSS galaxies to fit a 3rd degree polynom:

z = f(NUV, u, g, r, i, z)

The polynom coefficients are hereafter used to derive a photometric redshift. Note that this calibration rely on the SDSS spectroscopic sample (selected with r<17.5), and that the relation derived is, strictly speaking, only valid in the same volume. We explicitly use it in a larger volume in the following.

2. Template-fitting with no assumption

We first compute photometric redshifts using lephare with redshift as a free parameter. The code use galaxy, star, and qso templates.

3. Template fitting with polyfit redshift assumption

We then compute photometric redshift using lephare fixing redshift as the one derived from polyfit. The code only uses galaxy templates.

4. Template fitting with spectroscopic redshift assumption

We then compute photometric redshift using lephare fixing redshift as the spectroscopic one. The code only uses galaxy templates.



The results

Comparison spectroscopic – photometric redshifts

Chi square classification

Color-color plots

Fraction prediction

Counts

Redshift distribution



The catalogs