Introducing the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyα (TESLA) Survey: Initial Study Correlating Galaxy Properties to Lyα Emission

Abstract

Abstract We present the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyα (TESLA), a spectroscopic survey in the 10 deg2 of the Euclid North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) field. Using TESLA, we study how the physical properties of Lyα emitters (LAEs) correlate with Lyα emission to understand the escape of Lyα emission from galaxies at redshifts of 2–3.5. We present an analysis of 43 LAEs performed in the NEP field using early data from the TESLA survey. We use Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging in the grizy bands, Spitzer/IRAC channels 1 and 2 from the Hawaii 20 deg2 (H20) survey, and spectra acquired by the Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) on the Hobby–Eberly Telescope. We perform spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to compute the galaxy properties of 43 LAEs, and study correlations between stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), and dust to the Lyα rest-frame equivalent width (W Lyα ). We uncover marginal (1σ significance) correlations between stellar mass and W Lyα , and SFR and W Lyα , with a Spearman correlation coefficient of −0. 34 − .14 + .17 and −0. 37 − .14 + .16 , respectively. We show that the W Lyα distribution of the 43 LAEs is consistent with being drawn from an exponential distribution with an e-folding scale of W 0 = 150 Å. Once complete the TESLA survey will enable the study of ≳50,000 LAEs to explore more correlations between galaxy properties and W Lyα . The large sample size will allow the construction of a predictive model for W Lyα as a function of SED-derived galaxy properties, which could be used to improve Lyα-based constraints on reionization.