This Special Issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters is dedicated to presenting initial results from the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) that are primarily, but not exclusively, based on multi-band imaging data obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The survey covers roughly 320 square arcminutes in the ACS F435W, F606W, F814W, and F850LP bands, divided into two well-studied fields. Existing deep observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) and groundbased facilities are supplemented with new, deep imaging in the optical and

We present results from the Hubble Higher z Supernova Search, the first space-based open field survey for supernovae (SNe). In cooperation with the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, we have used the Hubble Space Telescope with the Advanced Camera for Surveys to cover $300 arcmin 2 in the area of the Chandra Deep Field South and the Hubble Deep Field North on five separate search epochs (separated by $45 day intervals) to a limiting magnitude of F850LP % 26. These deep observations have allowed us to discover 42 SNe in the redshift range 0:2 < z < 1:6. As these data span a large range in redshift, they are ideal for testing the validity of Type Ia supernova progenitor models with the distribution of expected ''delay times,'' from progenitor star formation to Type Ia SN explosion, and the SN rates these models predict. Through a Bayesian maximum likelihood test, we determine which delay-time models best reproduce the redshift distribution of SNe Ia discovered in this survey. We find that models that require a large fraction of ''prompt'' ( less than 2 Gyr) SNe Ia poorly reproduce the observed redshift distribution and are rejected at greater than 95% confidence. We find that Gaussian models best fit the observed data for mean delay times in the range of 2-4 Gyr.

We investigate morphological structure parameters and local environments of distant moderate-luminosity active galactic nucleus (AGN) host galaxies in the overlap between the HST/ACS observations of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) and the two Chandra Deep Fields. We compute near-neighbor counts and BViz asymmetry (A) and concentration (C) indices for ≈35,500 GOODS/ACS galaxies complete to , including z ≈ 26.6 850 the resolved hosts of 322 X-ray-selected AGNs. Distributions of (1) This implies no close connection between recent galaxy mergers and moderate-luminosity AGN activity out to appreciable look-back times ( ), approaching the epoch of peak AGN activity in the universe. The distriz Շ 1.3 bution of C for the AGN hosts is offset by compared to the non-AGN, a 6.4 j discrepancy much z DC ≈ ϩ0.5 850 larger than can be explained by the possible influence of unresolved emission from the AGN or a circumnuclear starburst. The local universe association between AGN and bulge-dominated galaxies thus persists to substantial look-back time. We discuss implications in the context of the low-redshift supermassive central black hole mass correlation with host galaxy properties, including concentration.

The Guide Star Catalog II (GSC-II) is an all-sky database of objects derived from the uncompressed Digitized Sky Surveys that the Space Telescope Science Institute has created from the Palomar and UK Schmidt survey plates and made available to the community. Like its predecessor (GSC-I), the GSC-II was primarily created to provide guide star information and observation planning support for Hubble Space Telescope. This version, however, is already employed at some of the ground-based new-technology telescopes such as GEMINI, VLT, and TNG, and will also be used to provide support for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and GAIA space missions as well as the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, one of the major ongoing scientific projects in China. Two catalogs have already been extracted from the GSC-II database and released to the astronomical community. A magnitude-limited (R F = 18.0) version, GSC2.2, was distributed soon after its production in 2001, while the GSC2.3 release has been available for general access since 2007. The GSC2.3 catalog described in this paper contains astrometry, photometry, and classification for 945,592,683 objects down to the magnitude limit of the plates. Positions are tied to the International Celestial Reference System; for stellar sources, the all-sky average absolute error per coordinate ranges from 0. 2 to 0. 28 depending on magnitude. When dealing with extended objects, astrometric errors are 20% worse in the case of galaxies and approximately a factor of 2 worse for blended images. Stellar photometry is determined to 0.13-0.22 mag as a function of magnitude and photographic passbands (R F , B J , I N ). Outside of the galactic plane, stellar classification is reliable to at least 90% confidence for magnitudes brighter than R F = 19.5, and the catalog is complete to R F = 20.

ABSTRACT. We describe the TFIT software package to measure galaxy photometry using prior information from high-resolution observations. Our basic methodology is similar in principle but different in detail from previous procedures for crowded field photometry. We use the spatial positions and morphologies of objects in an image with higher angular resolution to construct object templates, which are then fitted to a lower resolution image, solving for the object fluxes as free parameters. Using extensive experiments on both simulated and real data, we show that this template-fitting method measures accurate object photometry to the limiting sensitivity of the image. In this limit, our method derives robust flux upper limits for objects fainter than the limiting image surface brightness. We describe the challenges encountered in applying this technique to real data, and methods to cope with some of them.