Final public release of complete VIPERS galaxy catalogue of ~90,000 redshifts (PDR-2)
- 18 November 2016 -

Go to PDR-2 data download page



For the press: final science release information page






The large-scale distribution of galaxies as it was between 5 and 8 billion years ago, unveiled by the nearly 90,000 new galaxy distances mapped by the VIPERS project.




VIPERS FACTS
The "VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey" (VIPERS) is a completed ESO Large Program that has mapped in detail the spatial distribution of normal galaxies over an unprecedented volume of the z~1 Universe. It used the VIMOS spectrograph at the 8~m Very Large Telescope to measured spectra for more than 90,000 galaxies with red magnitude I(AB) brighter than 22.5 over an overall area of nearly 24 square degrees. At this redshift, VIPERS fills a unique niche in galaxy surveys, optimizing the combination of multi-band accurate photometry (5 bands from the CFHT-LS, plus Galex-NUV and NIR from WIRCAM and other facilities over most of the area) with the multiplexing capability of VIMOS. A robust color-color pre-selection allowed the survey to focus on the 0.5 < z < 1.2 redshift range, yielding an optimal combination of large volume (5 x 107 h-3 Mpc3) and high effective spectroscopic sampling (46% on average). VIPERS has produced a data set that in many respects represents for the first time the equivalent at z~1 of the large surveys of the "local" (z<0.2) Universe built at the beginning of this century (SDSS and 2dFGRS).

VIPERS scientific investigations are focusing on measurements of large-scale structure and cosmological parameters at an epoch when the Universe was about half its current age. At the same time, the survey is exploring the ensemble properties of galaxies with unprecedented statistical accuracy at these redshifts, providing the natural extension back in time to classical results from the SDSS.


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