The 0.1 <z < 1.65 evolution of the bright end of the [O ii] luminosity function^⋆,⋆⋆

¹ Departamento de Fisica Teorica, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
e-mail: johan.comparat@uam.es
² Instituto de Fisica Teorica UAM/CSIC, Madrid, Spain
³ Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille – LAM, Université d’Aix-Marseille & CNRS, UMR 7326, 38 rue F. Joliot-Curie, 13388 Marseille Cedex 13, France
⁴ CRAL, Observatoire de Lyon, Université Lyon 1, 9 avenue Ch. André, 69561 Saint Genis Laval Cedex, France
⁵ Laboratoire d’astrophysique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Observatoire de Sauverny, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
⁶ CPPM, Université d’Aix-Marseille, CNRS/IN2P3 Marseille, France
⁷ Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics, University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
⁸ Department of Physics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
⁹ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
¹⁰ Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG), Dennis Sciama Building, Burnaby Road, Univ. of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3FX, UK
¹¹ CEA, Centre de Saclay, IRFU, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
¹² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, 115 S 1400 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
¹³ Astronomy Department, University of Florida, 211 Bryant Space Science Center, Gainesville, FL 32611-2055, USA
¹⁴ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
¹⁵ Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
¹⁶ Key laboratory of Optical Astronomy, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100012 Beijing, PR China
¹⁷ Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
¹⁸ Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shangai Jiao Tong University, 200240 Shangai, PR China

Received: 7 August 2014
Accepted: 19 December 2014

Abstract

We present the [Oii] (λλ3729,3726) luminosity function measured in the redshift range 0.1 <z< 1.65 with unprecedented depth and accuracy. Our measurements are based on medium resolution flux-calibrated spectra of emission line galaxies with the visual and near UV FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph (FORS2) for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and with the SDSS-III/BOSS spectrograph. The FORS2 spectra and the corresponding catalog containing redshifts and line fluxes are released along with this paper. In this work we use a novel method to combine these surveys with GAMA, zCOSMOS, and VVDS, which have different target selection, producing a consistent weighting scheme to derive the [Oii] luminosity function. The[Oii] luminosity function is in good agreement with previous independent estimates. The comparison with two state-of-the-art semi-analytical models is good, which is encouraging for the production of mock catalogs of [Oii] flux limited surveys. We observe the bright end evolution over 8.5 Gyr: we measure the decrease of log L_∗ from 42.4 erg/s at redshift 1.44 to 41.2 at redshift 0.165 and we find that the faint end slope flattens when redshift decreases. This measurement confirms the feasibility of the target selection of future baryonic acoustic oscillation surveys aiming at observing [Oii] flux limited samples.