April 23, 2016

A new paper by COSMOS member Andreas Faisst and team shows how to use Spitzer colors to derive emission line properties of 3 < z < 6 galaxies. Optical emission lines at z > 4 cannot be measured spectroscopically with current facilities. Since emission lines "contaminate" the Spitzer 3.6um and 4.5um channels, these can be used to estimate optical line emission without the need of spectra. The study of emission lines provides important information about galaxy formation in the early universe and also provides a sample of galaxies for future JWST follow-up. The ApJ paper is in print and can be retrieved here: http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/821/122