GaBoDS: the Garching-Bonn Deep Survey

III. Lyman-break galaxies in the Chandra Deep Field South

¹ Institut für Astrophysik und extraterrestrische Forschung, Universität Bonn, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany e-mail: hendrik@astro.uni-bonn.de
² Astronomisches Institut der Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany
³ Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Apartado de correos 321, 38700 Santa Cruz de La Palma, Tenerife, Spain


Received: 15 December 2004
Accepted: 23 June 2005

Abstract

We present first results of our search for high-redshift galaxies in deep CCD mosaic images. As a pilot study for a larger survey, very deep images of the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS), taken with WFI@MPG/ESO2.2m, are used to select large samples of 1070 U-band and 565 B-band dropouts with the Lyman-break method. The data of these Lyman-break galaxies are made public as an electronic table. These objects are good candidates for galaxies at z~3 and z~4 which is supported by their photometric redshifts. The distributions of apparent magnitudes and the clustering properties of the two populations are analysed, and they show good agreement to earlier studies. We see no evolution in the comoving clustering scale length from z~3 to z~4. The techniques presented here will be applied to a much larger sample of U-dropouts from the whole survey in near future.