Faintest Galaxy Morphologies From HST WFPC2 Imaging of the Hawaii Survey Fields
- 1 October 1995
- journal article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astronomical Journal
- Vol. 110, 1576
- https://doi.org/10.1086/117631
Abstract
We present very deep $HST$ WFPC2 images in the F814W filter of two Hawaii Survey fields, SSA13 and SSA22. Using these data with previous ground-based imaging and spectroscopy, we compare the colors, star-forming properties and morphologies of the faintest galaxies with a reference sample of bright nearby galaxies and analyze the changes in field galaxy morphology with magnitude. Our principal result is the identification of a new morphological class of ``chain'' galaxies at the faintest magnitudes. Based on limited spectroscopy, we tentatively conclude that these are linearly organized giant star-forming regions at $z = 0.5-3$ and, if this is correct, that these are large galaxies in the process of formation.Comment: 18 pages + 1 table of text as 1 LaTeX file (uses aastex style macros: aaspp.sty, flushrt.sty) plus 1 uuencoded compressed tar file of 12 PostScript figures (Figs. 3-9, 16-17, and 21-23). The remaining gray-scale plots are available by anonymous ftp at ftp://hubble.ifa.hawaii.edu/pub/preprints/plates To appear in the October 1995 Astronomical Journa