[BHH2011] E , the SIMBAD biblio

While the Swift satellite is primarily designed to study gamma-ray bursts, its ultraviolet and optical imaging and spectroscopy capabilities are also being used for a variety of scientific programs. In this study, we use the UV/Optical Telescope (UVOT) instrument on board Swift to discover 0.5 < z < 2 Lyman break galaxies (LBGs). UVOT has covered ∼266 arcmin² at >60 ks exposure time, achieving a limiting magnitude of u < 24.5, in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S). Applying UVOT near-ultraviolet color selection, we select 50 UV-dropouts from this UVOT CDF-S data. We match the selected sources with available multiwavelength data from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) South, Multiwavelength Survey by Yale-Chile, and COMBO-17 to characterize the spectral energy distributions for these galaxies and determine stellar masses, star formation rates (SFRs), and dust attenuations. We compare these properties for LBGs selected in this paper versus z ∼ 3 LBGs and other CDF-S galaxies in the same redshift range (0.5 < z < 2), identified using photometric redshift techniques. The z ∼ 1 LBGs have stellar masses of */M_☉> = 9.4±0.6, which is slightly lower than z ∼ 3 LBGs (*/M_☉> = 10.2±0.4) and slightly higher compared with the z ∼ 1 CDF-S galaxies (*/M_☉> = 8.7±0.7). Similarly, our sample of z ∼ 1 LBGs has SFRs (derived using both ultraviolet and infrared data, where available) of ☉/yr)> = 0.7±0.6, nearly an order of magnitude lower than z ∼ 3 LBGs (☉/yr> = 1.5±0.4), but slightly higher than the comparison z ∼ 1 sample of CDF-S galaxies (☉/yr> = 0.2±0.7). We find that our z ∼ 1 UV-dropouts have FUV> = 2.0±1.0, which is higher than z ∼ 3 LBGs (FUV> = 1.0±0.5), but similar to the distribution of dust attenuations in the other CDF-S galaxies (FUV> ∼ 2.8 ± 1.5). Using the GOODS-South multiwavelength catalog of galaxies, we simulate a larger and fainter sample of LBGs to compare their properties with those of the UVOT-selected LBG sample. We conclude that UVOT can be useful for finding and studying the bright end of 0.5 < z < 2.0 LBGs.