The VANDELS ESO public spectroscopic survey

Abstract

VANDELS is an ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey designed to build a sample of high-signal-to-noise ratio, medium-resolution spectra of galaxies at redshifts between 1 and 6.5. Here we present the final Public Data Release of the VANDELS Survey, comprising 2087 redshift measurements. We provide a detailed description of sample selection, observations, and data reduction procedures. The final catalogue reaches a target selection completeness of 40% at iAB = 25. The high signal-to-noise ratio of the spectra (above 7 in 80% of the spectra) and the dispersion of 2.5 Å allowed us to measure redshifts with high precision, the redshift measurement success rate reaching almost 100%. Together with the redshift catalogue and the reduced spectra, we also provide optical mid-infrared photometry and physical parameters derived through fitting the spectral energy distribution. The observed galaxy sample comprises both passive and star forming galaxies covering a stellar mass range of 8.3 < Log(M*/M⊙) < 11.7.

The GOGREEN survey: dependence of galaxy properties on halo mass at z > 1 and implications for environmental quenching

“…For the SXDF field we supplement the GOGREEN redshifts with data from UDSz (Bradshaw et al 2013;McLure et al 2013), the XMM-Large Scale Structure (XMM-LSS) survey (Chiappetti et al 2013;Melnyk et al 2013), and VANDELS (Garilli et al 2021). 3D-HST data are again used only for debiasing the photometric redshifts.…”

No strong dependence of Lyman continuum leakage on physical properties of star-forming galaxies at $\mathbf{3.1 \lesssim z \lesssim 3.5}$

“…The latest VANDELS data release, DR4 (Garilli et al 2021) 2 contains spectra of ∼ 2100 galaxies in the redshift range 1.0 < 𝑧 < 7.0, with on-source integration times ranging from 20 to 80 hours, where > 70% of the targets have at least 40 hours of integration time. The survey depths have been chosen so that the final spectra have high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), enabling detailed absorption and emission line studies, the study of ionising sources using emission line ratios, the derivation of accurate metallicities and better constraints on physical parameters such as stellar masses and star-formation rates.…”

The stellar metallicities of massive quiescent galaxies at 1.0 < z < 1.3 from KMOS+VANDELS

“…VANDELS (M18; Pentericci et al 2018;Garilli et al 2021) is a large ESO public spectroscopic survey of the high-redshift Universe, using the VIsible Multi Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The primary aim of VANDELS is to detect continuum emission at high SNR for high-redshift galaxies, moving beyond redshift acquisition to study galaxy physical properties within the first 5 billion years prior to 𝑧 = 1.…”

“…Spectroscopic redshifts were measured by the VANDELS team using the pandora.ez software (Garilli et al 2010). Spectra were assigned redshift quality flags following Le Fèvre et al (2013), with all but 12 of the 281 observed massive quiescent galaxies assigned quality flags 3 or 4, corresponding to 95 and 100 per cent probabilities of correct identification respectively (in fact, Garilli et al 2021 demonstrate ∼ 99 per cent reliability for the VANDELS flag 3 and 4 redshifts combined). The 12 spectra with lower quality flags, as well as one low-redshift interloper, were excluded from this work, leaving 268 spectra.…”

“…In this work, we present the first determination of the stellar metallicities of a mass-selected sample of quiescent galaxies at 𝑧 > 1. We combine rest-frame near-UV data from the VANDELS survey (M18; Pentericci et al 2018;Garilli et al 2021) with new rest-frame optical KMOS 𝑌 𝐽−band spectroscopy, to produce a stacked spectrum covering rest-frame 2500−6400 Å for UVJ-selected galaxies at 1.0 < 𝑧 < 1.3 with log 10 (𝑀 * /M ) > 10.8. We fit our stack using both B (Carnall et al 2018) and A (Conroy & van Dokkum 2012;Conroy et al 2018), obtaining consistent ages and metallicities.…”