???The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Royal Astronomical Society. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15383.xWe investigate a class of rapidly growing emission line galaxies, known as 'Green Peas', first noted by volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo project because of their peculiar bright green colour and small size, unresolved in Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging. Their appearance is due to very strong optical emission lines, namely [O iii]??5007 ??, with an unusually large equivalent width of up to ???1000 ??. We discuss a well-defined sample of 251 colour-selected objects, most of which are strongly star forming, although there are some active galactic nuclei interlopers including eight newly discovered narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies. The star-forming Peas are low-mass galaxies (M??? 108.5???1010 M???) with high star formation rates (???10 M??? yr???1) , low metallicities (log[O/H]+ 12 ??? 8.7) and low reddening [ E(B???V) ??? 0.25 ] and they reside in low-density environments. They have some of the highest specific star formation rates (up to ???10???8 yr???1 ) seen in the local Universe, yielding doubling times for their stellar mass of hundreds of Myr. The few star-forming Peas with Hubble Space Telescope imaging appear to have several clumps of bright star-forming regions and low surface density features that may indicate recent or ongoing mergers. The Peas are similar in size, mass, luminosity and metallicity to luminous blue compact galaxies. They are also similar to high-redshift ultraviolet-luminous galaxies, e.g. Lyman-break galaxies and Ly?? emitters, and therefore provide a local laboratory with which to study the extreme star formation processes that occur in high-redshift galaxies. Studying starbursting galaxies as a function of redshift is essential to understanding the build up of stellar mass in the Universe

We present the catalog of optical and infrared counterparts of the Chandra COSMOS-Legacy Survey, a 4.6 Ms Chandra program on the 2.2 deg 2 of the COSMOS field, combination of 56 new overlapping observations obtained in Cycle 14 with the previous C-COSMOS survey. In this Paper we report the i, K, and 3.6 μm identifications of the 2273 X-ray point sources detected in the new Cycle 14 observations. We use the likelihood ratio technique to derive the association of optical/infrared (IR) counterparts for 97% of the X-ray sources. We also update the information for the 1743 sources detected in C-COSMOS, using new K and 3.6 μm information not available when the C-COSMOS analysis was performed. The final catalog contains 4016 X-ray sources, 97% of which have an optical/IR counterpart and a photometric redshift, while ;54% of the sources have a spectroscopic redshift. The full catalog, including spectroscopic and photometric redshifts and optical and X-ray properties described here in detail, is available online. We study several X-ray to optical (X/O) properties: with our large statistics we put better constraints on the X/O flux ratio locus, finding a shift toward faint optical magnitudes in both soft and hard X-ray band. We confirm the existence of a correlation between X/O and the the 2-10 keV luminosity for Type 2 sources. We extend to low luminosities the analysis of the correlation between the fraction of obscured AGNs and the hard band luminosity, finding a different behavior between the optically and X-ray classified obscured fraction.

We present deep optical 18-medium-band photometry from the Subaru telescope over the ∼30 × 30 Extended Chandra Deep Field-South, as part of the Multiwavelength Survey by Yale-Chile (MUSYC). This field has a wealth of ground-and space-based ancillary data, and contains the GOODS-South field and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. We combine the Subaru imaging with existing UBVRIzJHK and Spitzer IRAC images to create a uniform catalog. Detecting sources in the MUSYC "BVR" image we find ∼40,000 galaxies with R AB < 25.3, the median 5σ limit of the 18 medium bands. Photometric redshifts are determined using the EAzY code and compared to ∼2000 spectroscopic redshifts in this field. The medium-band filters provide very accurate redshifts for the (bright) subset of galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts, particularly at 0.1 < z < 1.2 and at z 3.5. For 0.1 < z < 1.2, we find a 1σ scatter in Δz/(1 + z) of 0.007, similar to results obtained with a similar filter set in the COSMOS field. As a demonstration of the data quality, we show that the red sequence and blue cloud can be cleanly identified in rest-frame color-magnitude diagrams at 0.1 < z < 1.2. We find that ∼20% of the red sequence galaxies show evidence of dust emission at longer rest-frame wavelengths. The reduced images, photometric catalog, and photometric redshifts are provided through the public MUSYC Web site.

We present the rest-frame optical morphologies of active galactic nucleus (AGN) host galaxies at 1.5 < z < 3, using near-infrared imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3, the first such study of AGN host galaxies at these redshifts. The AGN are X-ray selected from the Chandra Deep Field South and have typical luminosities of 10 42 < L X < 10 44 erg s −1 . Accreting black holes in this luminosity and redshift range account for a substantial fraction of the total space density and black hole mass growth over cosmic time; they thus represent an important mode of black hole growth in the universe. We find that the majority (∼ 80%) of the host galaxies of these AGN have low Sérsic indices indicative of disk-dominated light profiles, suggesting that secular processes govern a significant fraction of the cosmic growth of black holes. That is, many black holes in the presentday universe grew much of their mass in disk-dominated galaxies and not in early-type galaxies or major mergers. The properties of the AGN host galaxies are furthermore indistinguishable from their parent galaxy population and we find no strong evolution in either effective radii or morphological mix between z ∼ 2 and z ∼ 0.05.

We use data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and visual classifications of morphology from the Galaxy Zoo project to study black hole growth in the nearby Universe (z < 0.05) and to break down the AGN host galaxy population by color, stellar mass and morphology. We find that black hole growth at luminosities L[O iii] > 10 40 ergs −1 in early-and late-type galaxies is fundamentally different. AGN host galaxies as a population have a broad range of stellar masses (10 10 − 10 11 M ⊙ ), reside in the green valley of the color-mass diagram and their central black holes have median masses around 10 6.5 M ⊙ . However, by comparing early-and late-type AGN host galaxies to their non-active counterparts, we find several key differences: in early-type galaxies, it is preferentially the galaxies with the least massive black holes that are growing, while late-type galaxies, it is preferentially the most massive black holes that are growing. The duty cycle of AGN in early-type galaxies is strongly peaked in the green valley below the low-mass end (10 10 M ⊙ ) of the red sequence at stellar masses where there is a steady supply of blue cloud progenitors. The duty cycle of AGN in late-type galaxies on the other hand peaks in massive (10 11 M ⊙ ) green and red late-types which generally do not have a corresponding blue cloud population of similar mass. At high Eddington ratios (L/L Edd > 0.1), the only population with a substantial fraction of AGN are the low-mass green valley early-type galaxies. Finally, the Milky Way likely resides in the "sweet spot" on the color-mass diagram where the AGN duty cycle of late-type galaxies is highest. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the role of AGN in the evolution of galaxies.