Bibcode
Chies-Santos, A. L.; Rodríguez del Pino, Bruno; Aragón-Salamanca, Alfonso; Bamford, Steven P.; Gray, Meghan E.; Wolf, Christian; Böhm, Asmus; Maltby, David T.; Pintos-Castro, I.; Sanchéz-Portal, Miguel; Weinzirl, Tim
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 450, Issue 4, p.4458-4474
Advertised on:
7
2015
Citations
12
Refereed citations
11
Description
We present an overview of and first results from the OMEGA (OSIRIS
Mapping of Emission-line Galaxies in the multicluster system A901/2)
survey. The ultimate goal of this project is to study star formation and
active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity across a broad range of
environments at a single redshift. Using the tuneable-filter mode of the
Optical System for Imaging and low-Intermediate-Resolution Integrated
Spectroscopy (OSIRIS) instrument on Gran Telescopio Canarias, we target
H α and [N II] emission lines over an ˜0.5 × 0.5
deg2 region containing the z ˜ 0.167 multicluster
system A901/2. In this paper, we describe the design of the survey, the
observations and the data analysis techniques developed. We then present
early results from two OSIRIS pointings centred on the cores of the
A901a and A902 clusters. AGN and star-forming (SF) objects are
identified using the [N II] / H α versus WH α
diagnostic diagram. The AGN hosts are brighter, more massive, and
possess earlier type morphologies than SF galaxies. Both populations
tend to be located towards the outskirts of the high-density regions we
study. The typical H α luminosity of these sources is
significantly lower than that of field galaxies at similar redshifts,
but greater than that found for A1689, a rich cluster at z ˜ 0.2.
The H α luminosities of our objects translate into star formation
rates (SFRs) between ˜0.02 and 6 M⊙
yr-1. Comparing the relationship between stellar mass and H
α-derived SFR with that found in the field indicates a suppression
of star formation in the cores of the clusters. These findings agree
with previous investigations of this multicluster structure, based on
other star formation indicators, and demonstrate the power of tuneable
filters for this kind of study.