Astron. Astrophys. 363, 476-492 (2000)

7. Conclusions

We have presented the characteristics and the performances of our public code hyperz , available on the web, which make use of the template SED fitting technique. We can summarize the main conclusions as follows:

1. Simulations of ideal catalogues have shown the main trends of the accuracy on calculations. In particular, estimates are improved when the filters set spans a wide wavelength range, including near-IR and U filters, and when the photometric errors become small.

2. We have investigated the weight of the different parameters on the final results, using both a spectroscopic subsample of HDF and simulations. In particular, the templates, the flux decrement by Lyman forest, the age of the stellar population, the reddening, the cosmology, the metallicity, the IMF and the presence of emission lines have been discussed. According to these results, the preciseness seems to be more sensitive to the photometric accuracy rather than to the detailed set of parameters. Nevertheless, a subset of these parameters (reddening, age of the stellar population and Lyman forest blanketing) has to span a sufficiently wide range of values to obtain accurate s.

3. The robustness of the method has been illustrated through realistic deep field simulations, aiming to reproduce the redshift distribution, photometric accuracy and limiting magnitudes encountered in deep field surveys.

4. We have pointed out some of the manifold applications of the photometric redshift machinery in present and future projects.

5. We plan to include AGN SEDs in the present scheme of hyperz , as well as stellar templates, in order to automatically classify objects in a photometric survey through a unique pipeline. This particular application is presently under development (Hatziminaoglou et al. 2000).

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 2000

Online publication: December 11, 2000
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