The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. VLT/FORS2 Spectroscopy in the GOODS-South Field: Part III

摘要

Aims. We present the full data set of the spectroscopic campaign of the ESO/GOODS program in the GOODS-South field, obtained with the FORS2 spectrograph at the ESO/VLT. Method. Objects were selected ascandidates for VLT/FORS2 observations primarily based on the expectation thatthe detection and measurement of their spectral features would benefit from thehigh throughput and spectral resolution of FORS2. The reliability of theredshift estimates is assessed using the redshift-magnitude and color-redshiftdiagrams, and comparing the results with public data. Results. Including thethird part of the spectroscopic campaign (12 masks) to the previous work (26masks, Vanzella et al. 2005, 2006), 1715 spectra of 1225 individual targetshave been analyzed. The actual spectroscopic catalog provides 887 redshiftdeterminations. The typical redshift uncertainty is estimated to be sigma(z) ~0.001. Galaxies have been selected adopting different color criteria and usingphotometric redshifts. The resulting redshift distribution typically spans twodomains: from z=0.5 to 2 and z=3.5 to 6.3. The reduced spectra and the derivedredshifts are released to the community through the ESO web pagehttp://www.eso.org/science/goods/