A Successful Broad-band Survey for Giant Lya Nebulae I: Survey Design and Candidate Selection

Giant Lya nebulae (or Lya "blobs") are likely sites of ongoing massive galaxy formation, but the rarity of these powerful sources has made it difficult to form a coherent picture of their properties, ionization mechanisms, and space density. Systematic narrow-band Lya nebula surveys are ongoing, but the small redshift range covered and the observational expense limit the comoving volume that can be probed by even the largest of these surveys and pose a significant problem when searching for such rare sources. We have developed a systematic search technique designed to find large Lya nebulae at 2
Comment: Accepted to ApJ after minor revision; 25 pages in emulateapj format; 18 figures, 3 tables