The Distribution of Lyα-emitting Galaxies at z=2.38. II. Spectroscopy

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• Palunas, Povilas
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• Teplitz, Harry I.
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• Williger, Gerard M.
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• Woodgate, Bruce E.

Abstract

In Paper 1 of this series we identified an 80 comoving Mpc filament of candidate Lyα-emitting galaxies at redshift 2.38. In this paper we present spectroscopy of the 37 galaxy candidates. Our spectroscopy reached a surface brightness limit of 5.0×10^-17ergscm^-2s^-1arcsec^-2. Of the 14 candidates down to this limit, 12 were confirmed to be Lyα-emitting galaxies at the filament redshift. We also obtained spectral confirmation for six of the lower surface brightness candidates, all of which also lay at the filament redshift. In addition, we identify a foreground cluster of QSOs at z=1.65.