Large Cosmic Variance in the Clustering Properties of Lyman Alpha Emitters at z~5

Abstract

We reported in a previous paper the discovery of large-scale structure of Lyman Alpha emitters (LAEs) at z=4.86+-0.03 with a projected size of 20 Mpc x 50 Mpc in narrow-band data of a 25' x 45' area of the Subaru Deep Field (Omega_0=0.3, lambda_0=0.7, H0=70 km/s/Mpc). However, the surveyed area, which corresponds to 55 Mpc x 100 Mpc, was not large enough that we can conclude that we are seeing a typical distribution of z~5 LAEs. In this Letter, we report the results of follow-up imaging of the same sky area using a new narrow-band filter (NB704, lambda_c=7046 A and FWHM=100 A) to detect LAEs at z=4.79, i.e., LAEs lying closer to us by 39 Mpc on average than the z=4.86 objects. We detect 51 LAEs at z=4.79+-0.04 down to NB704=25.7, and find that their sky distribution is quite different from the z=4.86 LAEs'. The clustering of z=4.79 LAEs is very weak on any scales and there is no large-scale high- contrast structure. The shape and the amplitude of the angular correlation function are thus largely different between the two samples. These results demonstrate a large cosmic variance in the clustering properties of LAEs on scales of ~ 50 Mpc.Comment: 4 pages (uses emulateapj5.sty), accepted for ApJ