Cosmic Star Formation History toz = 1 from a Narrow Emission Line-selected Tunable-Filter Survey

We report the results of a deep 3D imaging survey of the Hubble Deep FieldNorth using the Taurus Tunable Filter and the William Herschel Telescope. Thissurvey was designed to search for new line emitting populations of objectsmissed by other techniques and to measure the cosmic star-formation ratedensity from a line-selected survey. We observed in three contiguous sequencesof narrow band slices in the 7100, 8100 and 9100A regions of the spectrum,corresponding to a cosmological volume of up to 1000 Mpc^3 at z=1, down to aflux limit of 2x 10^-17 ergs cm^-2 s^-1. The survey is deep enough to be highlycomplete for low line luminosity galaxies. Cross-matching with existingspectroscopy in the field results in a small line-luminosity limited sample,with very highly redshift identification completeness containing seven [OII],Hbeta and Halpha emitters over the redshift range 0.3 - 0.9. Treating this as adirect star-formation rate selected sample we estimate the star-formationhistory of the Universe to z=1. We find no evidence for any new population ofline emitting objects contributing significantly to the cosmologicalstar-formation rate density. Rather from our complete narrow-band sample wefind the star-formation history is consistent with earlier estimates frombroad-band imaging surveys and other less deep line-selected surveys.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. ApJ in press (Dec 2004