No Arabic abstract
We describe a search for submillimeter emission in the vicinity of one of the most distant, luminous galaxies known, HerMES FLS3 at z=6.34, exploiting it as a signpost to a potentially biased region of the early Universe, as might be expected in hierarchical structure formation models. Imaging to the confusion limit with the innovative, wide-field submillimeter bolometer camera, SCUBA-2, we are sensitive to colder and/or less luminous galaxies in the surroundings of HFLS3. We use the Millennium Simulation to illustrate that HFLS3 may be expected to have companions if it is as massive as claimed, but find no significant evidence from the surface density of SCUBA-2 galaxies in its vicinity, or their colors, that HFLS3 marks an over-density of dusty, star-forming galaxies. We cannot rule out the presence of dusty neighbours with confidence, but deeper 450-um imaging has the potential to more tightly constrain the redshifts of nearby galaxies, at least one of which likely lies at z>~5. If associations with HFLS3 can be ruled out, this could be taken as evidence that HFLS3 is less biased than a simple extrapolation of the Millennium Simulation may imply. This could suggest either that it represents a rare short-lived, but highly luminous, phase in the evolution of an otherwise typical galaxy, or that this system has suffered amplification due to a foreground gravitational lens and so is not as intrinsically luminous as claimed.
We present structural parameters and morphological properties of faint 450-um selected submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) from the JCMT Large Program, STUDIES, in the COSMOS-CANDELS region. Their properties are compared to an 850um selected and a matched star-forming samples. We investigate stellar structures of 169 faint 450-um sources (S450=2.8-29.6mJy; S/N>4) at z<3 using HST near-infrared observations. Based on our spectral energy distribution fitting, half of such faint SMGs (LIR=10^11.65+-0.98Lsun) lie above the star-formation rate (SFR)/stellar mass plane. The size-mass relation shows that these SMGs are generally similar to less-luminous star-forming galaxies selected by NUV-r vs. r-J colors. Because of the intrinsic luminosity of the sample, their rest-frame optical emission is less extended than the 850um sources (S850>2mJy), and more extended than the star-forming galaxies in the same redshift range. For the stellar mass and SFR matched sample at z~=1 and z~=2, the size differences are marginal between faint SMGs and the matched galaxies. Moreover, faint SMGs have similar Sersic indices and projected axis ratios as star-forming galaxies with the same stellar mass and SFR. Both SMGs and the matched galaxies show high fractions (~70%) of disturbed features at z~=2, and the fractions depend on the SFRs. These suggest that their star formation activity is related to galaxy merging, and the stellar structures of SMGs are similar to those of star-forming galaxies. We show that the depths of submillimeter surveys are approaching the lower luminosity end of star-forming galaxies, allowing us to detect galaxies on the main sequence.
We report the results of a deep SCUBA-2 850- and 450-$mu$m survey for dust-obscured ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (U/LIRGs) in the field of the z=1.46 cluster XCS J2215.9-1738. We detect a striking overdensity of sub-millimeter sources coincident with the core of this cluster: $sim 3-4 times$ higher than expected in a blank field. We use the likely radio and mid-infrared counterparts to show that the bulk of these sub-millimeter sources have spectroscopic or photometric redshifts which place them in the cluster and that their multi-wavelength properties are consistent with this association. The average far-infrared luminosities of these galaxies are $(1.0pm0.1) times 10^{12} L_{odot}$, placing them on the U/LIRG boundary. Using the total star formation occurring in the obscured U/LIRG population within the cluster we show that the resulting mass-normalized star-formation rate for this system supports previous claims of a rapid increase in star-formation activity in cluster cores out to $zsim1.5$, which must be associated with the on-going formation of the early-type galaxies which reside in massive clusters today.
We analyse new SCUBA-2 submillimeter and archival SPIRE far-infrared imaging of a z=1.62 cluster, Cl0218.3-0510, which lies in the UKIDSS/UDS field of the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey. Combining these tracers of obscured star formation activity with the extensive photometric and spectroscopic information available for this field, we identify 31 far-infrared/submillimeter-detected probable cluster members with bolometric luminosities >1e12 Lo and show that by virtue of their dust content and activity, these represent some of the reddest and brightest galaxies in this structure. We exploit Cycle-1 ALMA submillimeter continuum imaging which covers one of these sources to confirm the identification of a SCUBA-2-detected ultraluminous star-forming galaxy in this structure. Integrating the total star-formation activity in the central region of the structure, we estimate that it is an order of magnitude higher (in a mass-normalised sense) than clusters at z~0.5-1. However, we also find that the most active cluster members do not reside in the densest regions of the structure, which instead host a population of passive and massive, red galaxies. We suggest that while the passive and active populations have comparable near-infrared luminosities at z=1.6, M(H)~-23, the subsequent stronger fading of the more active galaxies means that they will evolve into passive systems at the present-day which are less luminous than the descendants of those galaxies which were already passive at z~1.6 (M(H)~-20.5 and M(H)~-21.5 respectively at z~0). We conclude that the massive galaxy population in the dense cores of present-day clusters were already in place at z=1.6 and that in Cl0218.3-0510 we are seeing continuing infall of less extreme, but still ultraluminous, star-forming galaxies onto a pre-existing structure.
Many cosmological studies predict that early supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can only form in the most massive dark matter halos embedded within large scale structures marked by galaxy over-densities that may extend up to 10 physical Mpc. This scenario, however, has not been confirmed observationally, as the search for galaxy over-densities around high-z quasars has returned conflicting results. The field around the z=6.28 quasar SDSSJ1030+0524 (J1030) is unique for multi-band coverage and represents an excellent data legacy for studying the environment around a primordial SMBH. In this paper we present wide-area (25x25 arcmin), Y- and J-band imaging of the J1030 field obtained with the near infrared camera WIRCam at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). We built source catalogues in the Y- and J-band, and matched those with our photometric catalogue in the r, z, i bands presented in Morselli et al. (2014). We used these new infrared data together with H and K and Spitzer/IRAC data to refine our selection of Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs), extending our selection criteria to galaxies in the range 25.2<zAB<25.7. We selected 21 robust high-z candidates in the J1030 field with photometric redshift around 6 and colors i-z>=1.3. We found a significant asymmetry in the distribution of the high-z galaxies in J1030, supporting the existence of a coherent large-scale structure around the quasar. We compared our results with those of Bowler et al. (2015), who adopted similar LBGs selection criteria, and estimated an over-density of galaxies in the field of delta = 2.4, which is significant at >4 sigma. The over-density value and its significance are higher than those found in Morselli et al. (2014), and we interpret this as evidence of an improved LBG selection.
Until recently, only a handful of dusty, star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) were known at $z>4$, most of them significantly amplified by gravitational lensing. Here, we have increased the number of such DSFGs substantially, selecting galaxies from the uniquely wide 250-, 350- and 500-$mu$m Herschel-ATLAS imaging survey on the basis of their extremely red far-infrared colors and faint 350- and 500-$mu$m flux densities - ergo they are expected to be largely unlensed, luminous, rare and very distant. The addition of ground-based continuum photometry at longer wavelengths from the JCMT and APEX allows us to identify the dust peak in their SEDs, better constraining their redshifts. We select the SED templates best able to determine photometric redshifts using a sample of 69 high-redshift, lensed DSFGs, then perform checks to assess the impact of the CMB on our technique, and to quantify the systematic uncertainty associated with our photometric redshifts, $sigma=0.14,(1+z)$, using a sample of 25 galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts, each consistent with our color selection. For Herschel-selected ultrared galaxies with typical colors of $S_{500}/S_{250}sim 2.2$ and $S_{500}/S_{350}sim 1.3$ and flux densities, $S_{500}sim 50,$mJy, we determine a median redshift, $hat{z}_{rm phot}=3.66$, an interquartile redshift range, 3.30$-$4.27, with a median rest-frame 8$-$1000-$mu$m luminosity, $hat{L}_{rm IR}$, of $1.3times 10^{13},$L$_odot$. A third lie at $z>4$, suggesting a space density, $rho_{z>4}$, of $approx 6 times 10^{-7},$Mpc$^{-3}$. Our sample contains the most luminous known star-forming galaxies, and the most over-dense cluster of starbursting proto-ellipticals yet found.