VISTA Ultra-deep Survey (V-UDS)

This page is to act as a focus for discussions of very deep (Kvega>=23) surveys using VISTA. The aim would be to obtain a better census of the high-redshift galaxy and AGN population at very faint limits than will be provided by the UKIDSS UDS survey. Hence, the survey should extend the planned limits of the UKIDSS UDS survey in terms of area coverage (VISTA versus WFCAM FOV), number of photometric bands (YZJHK versus JHK) and depth (goal of Kvega>23 and equivalently deep YZJH).

Key science goals for such surveys would include:

• Probing galaxy formation into the Dark Ages: z~>9 dropouts
• Luminosity functions for galaxies to ~0.1 L* at z>2-4+ to track the build up of stellar mass

The V-UDS fields will also be an obvious place for narrow-band searches for z=8.7 Ly-alpha emitters using the VISTA 1.18um filter. Potential survey fields include CDF-S, COSMOS, etc.

Plans for very deep VISTA surveys will be discussed at the Nottingham UKIDSS-UDS meeting on Friday 17th February.

There are now at least three ultra-deep proposals under consideration, led by:

• Olivier Le Fevre (olivier.lefevre@oamp.fr)
• Marijn Franx (franx@strw.leidenuniv.nl)
• Jim Dunlop (jsd@roe.ac.uk)

The first two proposals have similar aims, sparse-coverage of 1-2 fields (precise choice TBD), in ZYJHK - potentially focusing on the bluer bands for dropouts. The third proposal aims to obtain coverage in the bluer passbands of the UKIDSS/UDS field, where the K-band data already exists from UKIRT/WFCAM. Please contact the PIs if you wish to contribute to these proposals.

VISTA consortium web pages

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