AAS 198th Meeting, June 2001
Session 77. The Promise and Pitfalls of High Contrast Imaging
Display, Thursday, June 7, 2001, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall

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[77.13] High Redshift Galaxies and Confusion Noise for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

Z. Haiman, D.N. Spergel, E.L. Turner (Princeton University)

Faint, high redshift galaxies constitute a background noise for TPF, which can cause various problems, such as galaxies mis-classified as planets, false detections due to confusion noise, and requiring greater uv-plane coverage for each individual interferometer. We discuss these issues, and their impact on the observation strategy. We utilize semi-analytical galaxy formation models to quantify the number of high-redshift galaxies in a "worst case" scenario: i.e. in a model in which the number of galaxies are maximized in a way that is consistent with other current observations.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: zoltan@astro.princeton.edu

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