Stellar properties of z  ~ 1 Lyman-break galaxies from ACS slitless grism spectra

¹ ST-ECF, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
e-mail: knilsson@eso.org
² Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany

Received: 16 August 2010
Accepted: 8 November 2010

Abstract

Lyman-break galaxies are now regularly found in the high redshift Universe by searching for the break in the galaxy spectrum caused by the Lyman-limit redshifted into the optical or even near-IR. At lower redshift, this break is covered by the GALEX UV channels and small samples of z ~ 1 LBGs have been presented in the literature. Here we give results from fitting the spectral energy distributions of a small sub-set of low redshift LBGs and demonstrate the advantage of including photometric points derived from HST ACS slitless grism observations. The results show these galaxies to have very young, star forming populations, while still being massive and dusty. LBGs at low and high redshift show remarkable similarities in their properties, indicating that the LBG selection method picks similar galaxies throughout the Universe.