The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS): Overview

E. Egami (1) , M. Rex (2) , T. D. Rawle (1) , P. G. Pérez-González (3) , J. Richard (4) , J.-P. Kneib (5) , D. Schaerer (6) , B. Altieri (7) , I. Valtchanov (8) , A. W. Blain (9) , D. Fadda (8) , M. Zemcov (8) , J. J. Bock (8) , F. Boone (6) , C. R. Bridge (9) , B. Clement (5) , F. Combes (10) , M. Dessauges-Zavadsky (11) , C. D. Dowell (8) , O. Ilbert (5) , R. J. Ivison (12) , M. Jauzac (5) , D. Lutz (13) , L. Metcalfe (8) , A. Omont (14) , R. Pelló (6) , M. J. Pereira (1) , G. H. Rieke (1) , G. Rodighiero (8) , I. Smail (15) , G. P. Smith (16, 17, 18) , G. Tramoy (5) , G. L. Walth (1) , P. van Der Werf (19) , M. W. Werner (8)

1 Steward Observatory
2 AWI - Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung = Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research = Institut Alfred-Wegener pour la recherche polaire et marine
3 Departamento de Física y Astronomía
4 CRAL - Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon
5 LAM - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
6 IRAP - Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie
7 XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre
8 AUTRES
9 Department of Astronomy
10 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etude du Rayonnement et de la Matière en Astrophysique
11 ObsGE - Observatoire Astronomique de l'Université de Genève
12 ROE - Royal Observatory Edinburgh
13 MPE - Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik
14 IAP - Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
15 ICC - Institute for Computational Cosmology
16 UAB - University of Alabama at Birmingham [ Birmingham]
17 University of Bristol [Bristol]
18 UOR - University of Reading
19 Leiden Observatory [Leiden]

The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) will conduct deep PACS and SPIRE imaging of ~40 massive clusters of galaxies. The strong gravitational lensing power of these clusters will enable us to penetrate through the confusion noise, which sets the ultimate limit on our ability to probe the Universe with Herschel. Here we present an overview of our survey and a summary of the major results from our science demonstration phase (SDP) observations of the Bullet cluster (z = 0.297). The SDP data are rich and allow us to study not only the background high-redshift galaxies (e.g., strongly lensed and distorted galaxies at z = 2.8 and 3.2) but also the properties of cluster-member galaxies. Our preliminary analysis shows a great diversity of far-infrared/submillimeter spectral energy distributions (SEDs), indicating that we have much to learn with Herschel about the properties of galaxy SEDs. We have also detected the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect increment with the SPIRE data. The success of this SDP program demonstrates the great potential of the Herschel Lensing Survey to produce exciting results in a variety of science areas. Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA. Data presented in this paper were analyzed using "The Herschel interactive processing environment (HIPE)", a joint development by the Herschel Science Ground Segment Consortium, consisting of ESA, the NASA Herschel Science Center, and the HIFI, PACS and SPIRE consortia.Appendix is only available in electronic form at http://www.aanda.org

Mots clés: infrared: galaxies; submillimeter: galaxies; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: high-redshift; galaxies:; clusters: general

Domaines: Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]; Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]

E. Egami, M. Rex, T. D. Rawle, P. G. Pérez-González, J. Richard, et al.. The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS): Overview. Astronomy and Astrophysics - A&A, 2010, 518, pp.L12. ⟨10.1051/0004-6361/201014696⟩. ⟨hal-00660718⟩