Tomography of high-redshift clusters with OSIRIS

Abstract

High-redshift clusters of galaxies are amongst the largest cosmic structures. Their properties and evolution are key ingredients to our understanding of cosmology: to study the growth of structure from the inhomogeneities of the cosmic microwave background; the processes of galaxy formation, evolution, and differentiation; and to measure the cosmological parameters (through their interaction with the geometry of the universe, the age estimates of their component galaxies, or the measurement of the amount of matter locked in their potential wells). However, not much is yet known about the properties of clusters at redshifts of cosmological interest. We propose here a radically new method to study large samples of cluster galaxies using microslits to perform spectroscopy of huge numbers of objects in single fields in a narrow spectral range-chosen to fit an emission line at the cluster redshift. Our objective is to obtain spectroscopy in a very restricted wavelength range (~100 A in width) of several thousands of objects for each single 8x8 square arcmin field. Approximately 100 of them will be identified as cluster emission-line objects and will yield basic measurements of the dynamics and the star formation in the cluster (that figure applies to a cluster at z~0.50, and becomes ~40 and ~20 for clusters at z~0.75 and z~1.00 respectively). This is a pioneering approach that, once proven, will be followed in combination with photometric redshift techniques and applied to other astrophysical problems.