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Session 112 - Galaxy Surveys.
Oral session, Thursday, January 16
Harbour C,
We present the results of a wide-field K band galaxy survey. We have imaged nearly 10 square degrees in two fields at high galactic latitude using linear detectors in the near-infrared K band, and the optical B, V, and I bands. We have obtained spectroscopic redshifts for more than 500 galaxies selected on the basis of their K-band flux. In general, the data are consistent with simple passive evolution of the population of galaxies at low to intermediate redshifts, and do not require more extreme models. We presented the galaxy number counts in Gardner et al.\ 1996, and found that they do not confirm the steep slope that has been claimed for bright galaxy counts in other surveys. Our data provide galaxy count models with a high normalization, which puts the faint blue galaxy problem at B>24, rather than B\simeq 22 as is required by low normalization models. We presented the first measurement of the angular correlation function of a K-band selected galaxy survey in Baugh et al.\ 1996, and found that it is well described by a \theta^-0.8 power law, as for optically selected samples. We presented the first measurement of the K-band luminosity function of galaxies from a wide-field K-selected redshift survey in Gardner et al.\ 1997. The best fit Schechter function parameters are M = -23.12 +5 log(h), \alpha = -0.91, and \phi^* = 1.66 \times 10^-2 h^3 Mpc^-3. We estimate that systematics are no more than 0.1mag in M^* and 0.1 in \alpha, which is comparable to the statistical errors on this measurement. We present the rest-frame optical to near-infrared color distribution of galaxies, the color-luminosity relation, and constrain galaxy evolution by comparing our results to fainter galaxy surveys.
