LyC Leakers in the AstroSat UV Deep Field: Extreme UV emitters at the Cosmic Noon

We report the direct detection of Lyman Continuum (LyC) emission from 9 galaxies and 1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) at $z$ $\sim$ 1.1-1.6 in the GOODS-North field using deep observations from the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard AstroSat. The absolute escape fraction of the sources estimated from the far-ultraviolet (FUV) and H$\alpha$ line luminosities using Monte Carlo (MC) analysis of two Inter-Galactic Medium (IGM) models span a range $\sim$ 10 - 55 $\%$. The restframe UV wavelength of the sources falls in the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) regime $\sim$ 550-700 \AA, the shortest LyC wavelength range probed so far. This redshift range remains devoid of direct detections of LyC emission due to the instrumental limitations of previously available facilities. With UVIT having a very low detector noise, each of these sources are detected with an individual signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) $>$ 3 while for the stack of six sources, we achieve an SNR $\sim$ 7.4. The LyC emission is seen to be offset from the optical centroids and extended beyond the UVIT PSF of 1.$^{\prime\prime}6$ in most of the sources. This sample fills an important niche between GALEX and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) at low-$z$, and HST WFC3 at high-$z$ and is crucial in understanding the evolution of LyC leakers.
Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters