A Model-Independent Photometric Redshift Estimator · arXivDesk
astro-ph/9906256Jun 15, 19996 pages including 5 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the Workshop on Photometric Redshifts and High Redshift Galaxies, edited by Ray Weymann, Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, Marcin Sawicki, and Robert Brunner (Astronomical Society of the Pacific).}
A Model-Independent Photometric Redshift Estimator
We derive a simple empirical photometric redshift estimator using a training set of galaxies with multiband photometry and measured redshifts in the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). This estimator is model-independent; it does not use spectral templates. The dispersion between the estimated redshifts and the spectroscopically measured ones is small; the dispersions range from σz≃0.03 to 0.1 for z 2 galaxies, and from σz≃0.14
Nearby in the stack
to 0.25 for
z 2
galaxies. The predictions provided by our empirical redshift estimator agree well with recently measured galaxy redshifts. We illustrate how our empirical redshift estimator can be modified to include flat spectrum galaxies with