This team will extend their DEEP2 spectroscopic survey, using high dispersion spectra with the DEIMOS multi-object spectrograph at the Keck telescopes for galaxies in the redshift range 0.5 < z < 1.5. This redshift range represents 85% of cosmic history, over the time when most of the galaxy mass was assembled and galaxies formed their disks. The new DEEP3 survey concentrates on the extended Groth strip, an area on the sky that has been observed with many of NASA's great observatories. The team will use these and other archives to compile a panchromatic catalog describing their survey galaxies over a wide wavelength range from radio to X-rays. DEEP3 will push the limit of observations 2.5 times fainter than DEEP2, tripling the number of measured galaxies.
The team will estimate the rate at which their survey galaxies are forming their stars, by measuring their brightness in the ultraviolet, infrared and radio, and by using diagnostics based on the optical emission lines measured in the DEEP2 and DEEP3 surveys. They will investigate a tight relation found in DEEP2 between the rate of star formation in a galaxy and the mass in stars already present, and examine how galaxy environment and morphology affect that relation. Team members will use observations from the DEEP2 and DEEP3 surveys to study how scaling laws such as the Tully-Fisher relation (between a galaxy's luminosity and its circular rotation speed) change over time as disk galaxies are assembled. They will investigate the role of active galactic nuclei in star formation, and use X-ray observations to search for signs of faint hidden active nuclei.
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars will be trained as they participate in the research. As has been done for the earlier DEEP2 survey, data including redshifts, photometry, and spectra would be released to the astronomical community. Multiwavelength images from DEEP2, along with an interactive redshift catalog, are already available on google sky; more data will be added as the new survey proceeds.
