Photometric Redshifts for Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Data Release 1 [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05988


Photometric redshifts are a key component of many science objectives in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP). In this paper, we describe and compare the codes used to compute photometric redshifts for HSC-SSP, how we calibrate them, and the typical accuracy we achieve with HSC five-band photometry (grizy). We introduce a new point estimator based on an improved loss function and demonstrate that it works better than other commonly used estimators. We find that our photo-z’s are most accurate at 0.3<z<1.5, where we can straddle the 4000A break. We achieve sigma(dz/(1+z))~0.04 and an outlier rate of about 10% for galaxies down to i=25 within this redshift range, which should enable many science cases for HSC-SSP. We also characterize the accuracy of our redshift probability distribution function (PDF) and discover that some codes over/under-estimate the redshift uncertainties, which have implications for N(z) reconstruction. Our photo-z’s for the Deep and UltraDeep layers are available in the public data release, while those for the Wide layer will soon be made available. Both our catalog products (such as point estimates) and full PDFs are available from the data release site, https://hsc-release.mtk.nao.ac.jp/.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Tanaka, J. Coupon, B. Hsieh, et. al.
Fri, 21 Apr 17
21/73

Comments: 29 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, submitted to PASJ special issue