Evolution of the Ionizing Photon Luminosity Function
Evolution of the Ionizing Photon Luminosity Function
Stephan R. McCandliss, Swara Ravindranath, Sangeeta Malhotra, Chris Packham, Sophia Flury, Alexandra Le Reste, Allison Strom, Marc Postman, John OMeara
AbstractCounting the number and brightness of ionizing radiation sources out to a redshift of z ~ 1.2 will revolutionize our understanding of how the ionizing background is created and sustained by the embedded growth of meta-galactic structures. The shear number of sparsely separated targets required to efficiently construct redshift binned luminosity functions is industrial in scale, driving the need for low spectral resolution multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) with a short wavelength cut-off ~ 1000 {\AA}, a sensitivity in the far-UV to better than 30 abmag, and an instantaneous field-of-view ~ (2')$^2$. A MOS on Habitable Worlds Observatory is the only instrument that could conceivably carry out such an ambitious observing program.