Involved people at OAB: Mignoli, Pozzetti, Zamorani.
Bologna Observatory participates,
with the observatories of Arcetri,
ESO and Rome, to an ESO VLT Large Program (PI A. Cimatti (Arcetri)),
which has started in 1999. This program called
K20 aims at deriving the
redshift distribution of a sample complete at
K<20, i.e. about 500 galaxies
selected from a sub-area of the Chandra field (taken from the public ESO
EIS data) and from a field around the quasar 0055-2659 (z=3.7). Seventeen
VLT nights have been allocated to this project over a period of two years.
The survey makes use of both optical and near-IR spectroscopy.
The main scientific goal is to compare the observed
redshift distribution with the predictions of the galaxy formation
models in order to obtain stringent clues on the formation and evolution
of the present-day massive galaxies. The main byproducts are: the
K-band luminosity function, the spectral properties of a large number of
galaxies, the clustering properties of galaxies, the fraction of AGN in
K-selected samples, the improvement and the calibration of the photometric
redshift technique. The observations made in 1999 provided spectra of
all galaxies down to a completeness level of about 
, and the
spectral analysis and the redshift measurements are in progress.