ESP: brief description

The ESO SLICE PROJECT is a galaxy redshift survey we are accomplishing as an ESO Key-Project (PI: G.Vettolani) over about 23 square degrees in a region near the South Galactic Pole, to a limiting magnitude bJ = 19.4.

In September 1991 we started a galaxy redshift survey over a strip 22 x 1 sq.deg. (plus a nearby area 5 x 1 sq.deg., five degrees west of the strip) in the South Galactic Pole region. We filled this area with a regular grid of circular fields with a diameter of 32 arcmin. This size corresponds to the field of view of the multifiber spectrograph (OPTOPUS) we use at the ESO 3.6m telescope. We selected the target objects from the Edinburgh-Duhram Southern Sky Galaxy Catalogue (Heydon-Dumbleton et al. 1989), which has been obtained from COSMOS scans of 60 plates in the SGP region. We observed about 4000 objects, obtaining 3342 galaxy redshifts. At z ~ 0.1, which corresponds to the peak of the selection function of the survey, the linear dimensions of the main strip are about 110 x 5 Mpc.

The main goals of our project can be summarized as follows:

1. Determination of the galaxy luminosity function (estimating both its shape and normalization) in a volume with dimensions large enough to average over the large scale inhomogeneities.
2. Study of the statistics of emission line galaxies (liners, starburst and Seyfert galaxies) in a large, unbiased sample of galaxies.
3. Measure of the size distribution of inhomogeneities in the galaxy distribution over a large volume.