| Issue |
A&A
Volume 392, Number 2, September III 2002
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Page(s) | 395 - 406 | |
| Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20020861 | |
| Published online | 30 August 2002 | |
The K20 survey*
III. Photometric and spectroscopic properties of the sample
1
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
2
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, via Ranzani 1, 40127 Bologna, Italy
3
European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
4
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, via Dell'Osservatorio 2, Monteporzio, Italy
5
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, via E. Bianchi 46, Merate, Italy
6
Dipartimento di Astronomia, Università “La Sapienza”, Roma, Italy
7
Racah Institute for Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
8
ST, European Coordinating Facility, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
9
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Via Tiepolo 11, 34131 Trieste, Italy
Corresponding author: A. Cimatti, cimatti@arcetri.astro.it
Received:
5
April
2002
Accepted:
6
June
2002
The K20 survey is an ESO VLT optical and near-infrared
spectroscopic survey aimed at obtaining spectral information and
redshifts of a complete sample of about 550 objects to 
over two independent fields with a total area of 52 arcmin2. In this
paper we discuss the scientific motivation of such a survey, we
describe the photometric and spectroscopic properties of the sample,
and we release the Ks-band photometric catalog. Extensive
simulations showed that the sample is photometrically highly complete
to 
. The observed galaxy counts and the 
color
distribution are consistent with literature results.
We observed spectroscopically 94% of the sample, reaching a spectroscopic
redshift identification completeness of 92% to for the
observed targets, and of 87% for the whole sample (i.e. counting also
the unobserved targets). Deep spectroscopy was complemented with
multi-band deep imaging in order to derive tested and
reliable photometric redshifts for the galaxies lacking spectroscopic
redshifts. The results show a very good agreement between the spectroscopic and
the photometric redshifts with 
and with
a dispersion of 
.
Using both the spectroscopic and the photometric redshifts, we reached
an overall redshift completeness of about 98%.
The size of the sample, the redshift completeness, the
availability of high quality photometric redshifts and multicolor
spectral energy distributions make the K20 survey database one of the
most complete samples available to date for constraining the currently
competing scenarios of galaxy formation and for a variety of
other galaxy evolution studies.
Key words: galaxies: evolution; galaxies: formation
© ESO, 2002
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