GUAIX scientists J. Gallego and V. Villar belong to an international research team leaded by Prof. J.G. Cuby (Marseille) which was awarded with 120 hours of VLT telescope time to carry out the  181.A-0485(A) VLT Large Program under the title "Peering into the Dark Ages: towards establishing the luminosity function of Ly-alpha emitters at z = 7.7".

The projects consists in a deep nIR survey using a 1.06 microns narrow-band filter (NB1060) at the Hawk-I camera to look for emission-line galaxies.
Among several fields considered, the survey will start focusing into the A1689 cluster and the CFHTLS-D4 field. Data for GOODS-S will be soon available.

The main science driver is the detection of Ly-alpha emitters at z=7.7.

For more details on the project see the web page

Main results have been published by Clement et al. (2012) Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 538, id.A66, 14 pp.

GUAIX main interest is the large amount of galaxies that will be detected at z=0.61 by their H-alpha emission. This figure shows an example of object with a flux excess in the NB image with respect to the J band image.

The analysis of the z=0.6 Halpha emitters is being carried out by Carlos Gómez Guijarro. First results are published in his Degree Academic work. See the eprint for the PDF file.

List of Halpha emitters at z=0.6