J/ApJ/571/56 Detection of Extragalactic Background Light (Bernstein+, 2002)
The first detections of the extragalactic background light at
3000, 5500, and 8000Å. I. Results.
Bernstein R.A., Freedman W.L., Madore B.F.
<Astrophys. J. 571, 56 (2002)>
=2002ApJ...571...56B 2002ApJ...571...56B
ADC_Keywords: Galaxies, photometry
Keywords: cosmology: observations - diffuse radiation - dust, extinction -
galaxies: photometry - interplanetary medium - techniques: photometric
Abstract:
We present the first detection of the mean flux of the optical
extragalactic background light (EBL) at 3000, 5500, and 8000Å.
Diffuse foreground flux at these wavelengths comes from terrestrial
airglow, dust-scattered sunlight (zodiacal light), and dust-scattered
Galactic starlight (diffuse Galactic light). We have avoided the
brightest of these, terrestrial airglow, by measuring the absolute
surface brightness of the night sky from above the Earth's atmosphere
using the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Faint Object
Spectrograph, both on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). On the
ground we have used the du Pont 2.5m Telescope at the Las Campanas
Observatory (LCO) to obtain contemporaneous spectrophotometry of
"blank" sky in the HST field of view to measure and then subtract
foreground zodiacal light from the HST observations. We have minimized
the diffuse Galactic light in advance by selecting the HST target
field along a line of sight with low Galactic dust column density and
then estimated the low-level Galactic foreground using a simple
scattering model and the observed correlation between thermal,
100µm emission, and optical scattered flux from the same dust. In
this paper, we describe the coordinated LCO/HST program and the HST
observations and data reduction and present the resulting measurements
of the EBL.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
table2.dat 80 29 Sample of V555 Source Catalog
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: table2.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 12 A12 --- EBL EBL designation
14- 16 I3 pix Xpos X position (1)
18- 20 I3 pix Ypos Y position (1)
22- 23 I2 h RAh Right ascension (J2000.0)
25- 26 I2 min RAm Right ascension (J2000.0)
28- 32 F5.2 s RAs Right ascension (J2000.0)
34 A1 --- DE- Declination sign (J2000.0)
35- 36 I2 deg DEd Declination (J2000.0)
38- 39 I2 arcmin DEm Declination (J2000.0)
41- 44 F4.1 arcsec DEs Declination (J2000.0)
46- 50 F5.2 mag mtot Total magnitude, in AB magnitudes
52- 55 F4.2 mag e_mtot rms uncertainty on mtot, in AB magnitudes
57- 61 F5.2 mag miso Isophotal magnitude, in AB magnitudes
63- 66 F4.2 mag e_miso rms uncertainty on miso, in AB magnitudes
68- 70 I3 pix Aiso Isophotal area, in units of WF pixels (1)
72- 75 F4.2 pix a Flux-weighted, second-order moment along the
major axis, in units of WF pixels (1)
77- 80 F4.2 --- b/a Isophotal, weighted elongation (ratio of the
second order moments along the major and
minor axes, as calculated by SExtractor)
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Note (1): North is up, and east is left. 1 pix = 0.0996".
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History:
From electronic version of the journal
(End) James Marcout, Patricia Bauer [CDS] 12-Sep-2002