HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1: 220 K Sources Including Over 50 K Lyα Emitters from an Untargeted Wide-area Spectroscopic Survey

Abstract

We present the first publicly released catalog of sources obtained from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX is an integral field spectroscopic survey designed to measure the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance at 1.88 < z < 3.52 by using the spatial distribution of more than a million Lyα-emitting galaxies over a total target area of 540 deg2. The catalog comes from contiguous fiber spectra coverage of 25 deg2 of sky from 2017 January through 2020 June, where object detection is performed through two complementary detection methods: one designed to search for line emission and the other a search for continuum emission. The HETDEX public release catalog is dominated by emission-line galaxies and includes 51,863 Lyα-emitting galaxy (LAE) identifications and 123,891 [O ii]-emitting galaxies at z < 0.5. Also included in the catalog are 37,916 stars, 5274 low-redshift (z < 0.5) galaxies without emission lines, and 4976 active galactic nuclei. The catalog provides sky coordinates, redshifts, line identifications, classification information, line fluxes, [O ii] and Lyα line luminosities where applicable, and spectra for all identified sources processed by the HETDEX detection pipeline. Extensive testing demonstrates that HETDEX redshifts agree to within Δz < 0.02, 96.1% of the time to those in external spectroscopic catalogs. We measure the photometric counterpart fraction in deep ancillary Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging and find that only 55.5% of the LAE sample has an r-band continuum counterpart down to a limiting magnitude of r ∼ 26.2 mag (AB) indicating that an LAE search of similar sensitivity to HETDEX with photometric preselection would miss nearly half of the HETDEX LAE catalog sample. Data access and details about the catalog can be found online at http://hetdex.org/. A copy of the catalogs presented in this work (Version 3.2) is available to download at Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.7448504.