The Rest-Frame Optical Properties of SCUBA Galaxies

By I. Smail, S. Chapman, A. Blain, R. Ivison. 2004

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present optical and near-infrared photometry for a sample of 96 dusty, far-infrared-luminous galaxies. We have precise spectroscopic redshifts for all these galaxies, yielding a median redshift of = 2.2. The majority, 78, are submillimeter-detected galaxies lying at z = 0.2-3.6, while the remaining 18 are optically faint μJy radio galaxies at z = 0.9-3.4 that are proposed to be similarly luminous, dusty galaxies whose dust emission is too hot to be detected in the submillimeter waveband. We compare the photometric and morphological properties of these distant, ultraluminous galaxies with local samples of dusty, luminous galaxies. We confirm that spectroscopically identified far-infrared-luminous galaxies at z > 1 display a wide variety in their optical-near-infrared and near-infrared colors, with only a modest proportion red enough to classify as unusually red. We show that, on average, luminous, high-redshift dusty galaxies are both brighter and redder in rest-frame optical passbands than comparable samples of UV-selected star-forming galaxies at similar redshifts. Archival Hubble Space Telescope ACS imaging of 20 of our galaxies demonstrates both morphological indications of mergers and interactions, which may have triggered their luminous far-infrared activity, and structured dust distributions within these galaxies. We derive a near-infrared Hubble diagram for far-infrared-luminous galaxies. This shows that this population is typically fainter than high-luminosity radio galaxies at similar redshifts and exhibits significantly more scatter in their K-band magnitudes. The rest-frame optical luminosities of the far-infrared-luminous population are comparable to those of local ultraluminous infrared galaxies, although their far-infrared luminosities are several times higher. The typical extinction-corrected optical luminosity of the high-redshift population, assuming passive evolution, provides a good fit to the bright end of the luminosity function of luminous spheroidal galaxies seen in rich clusters at intermediate redshifts. This adds to the growing body of evidence showing that these high-redshift, far-infrared-luminous sources identify star formation and active galactic nucleus-fueling events in the early life of massive galaxies in the universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03e77ef07926a7d7f2b0ca190bf6e4a8285f97a4

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Citations in the corpus

High-Resolution Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy of Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (2007, background): “…superficially similar to their low-redshift counterparts in that they appear to be powered by both starburst and AGN activity (Farrah et al. 2002a; Smail et al. 2003, 2004; Alexander et al. 2005; Takata et al. 2006; Valiante et al. 2007), and are probably mergers (Farrah et al. 2002b;Chapman et…”
A TURNOVER IN THE GALAXY MAIN SEQUENCE OF STAR FORMATION AT M* ∼ 1010 M☉ FOR REDSHIFTS z < 1.3 (2015, background): “…the restframe UV emission in dusty galaxies suggests that applying the nominal attenuation laws (e.g. Meurer et al. 1999; Calzetti et al. 2000) will dramatically underestimate total star formation rate in galaxies exceeding ∼ 50M /yr (Smail et al. 2004; Casey et al. 2014; Rodighiero et al. 2014).”
DEEP U BAND AND R IMAGING OF GOODS-SOUTH: OBSERVATIONS, DATA REDUCTION AND FIRST RESULTS, (2009, background): “…emission, have also been used to identify populations of high-redshift objects, including distant red galaxies (Franx et al. 2003), extremely red objects (McCarthy 2004; Daddi et al. 2000), “BzK” galaxies (Daddi et al. 2004), and submillimeter galaxies (Chapman et al. 2005; Smail et al. 2004).”
WHAT DOES A SUBMILLIMETER GALAXY SELECTION ACTUALLY SELECT? THE DEPENDENCE OF SUBMILLIMETER FLUX DENSITY ON STAR FORMATION RATE AND DUST MASS (2010, background): “Indeed, many observations support a merger origin for SMGs (e.g., Ivison et al. 2002, 2007, 2010; Chapman et al. 2003; Neri et al. 2003; Smail et al. 2004; 5 Hubble Fellow.”
An ALMA survey of the SCUBA-2 CLS UDS field: physical properties of 707 sub-millimetre galaxies (2019, background): “First, we note that the observed K-band magnitude increases with increasing redshift, as a result of positive k-correction (Smail et al. 2004).”
Submillimetre galaxies in a hierarchical universe: number counts, redshift distribution, and implications for the IMF (2012, background): “There is significant observational support for this picture (e.g. Ivison et al. 2002, 2007, 2010; Chapman et al. 2003; Neri et al. 2003; Smail et al. 2004; Swinbank et al. 2004; Greve et al. 2005; Tacconi et al. 2006, 2008; Bouché et al. 2007; Biggs & Ivison 2008; Capak et al. 2008; Younger et al.…”
What Do We Learn from IRAC Observations of Galaxies at 2 < z < 3.5? (2006, background): “Among the newly discovered populations are submm galaxies (e.g. Smail et al. 2004), “IRAC Extremely Red Objects” (IEROs; Yan et al. 2004), “BzK” objects (Daddi et al. 2004) and distant red galaxies (DRGs; Franx et al. 2003).”
A Redshift Survey of the Submillimeter Galaxy Population (2004, methodology): “…0.15 for a Calzetti extinction law, very close to the distribution for LBGs presented in Adelberger & Steidel (2000), suggesting that the UV identifications of SMGs do not distinguish themselves from the general LBG population with significantly redder UV spectral slopes (c.f. Smail et al. 2004a).”
THE STELLAR MASS CONTENT OF SUBMILLIMETER-SELECTED GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “For SMGs in GOODS-N, we use theI data of Capak et al. (2004), but theJ andK data of Smail et al. (2004).”
DUSTY INFRARED GALAXIES: Sources of the Cosmic Infrared Background (2005, unknown): “Most of them are multi-component-distorted galaxy systems (Conselice et al. 2003; Smail et al. 2004).”
Dusty Star Forming Galaxies at High Redshift (2014, background): “This suggests that SMGs’ UV properties do not differ significantly from those of LBGs (Adelberger and Steidel, 2000), even though it might be thought that SMGs would have significantly redder slopes (Smail et al., 2004).”
Dynamical Properties of z ~ 2 Star-forming Galaxies and a Universal Star Formation Relation (2007, background): “SMGs are more compact and at the same time have greater velocity widths (as in Swinbank et al. 2004) than the UV/optically selected galaxies (by a factor of 2 in each coordinate; Greve et al. 2005; Tacconi et al. 2006; Iono et al. 2006).”
Cosmic evolution of submillimeter galaxies and their contribution to stellar mass assembly (2009, background): “Lots of studies have addressed the issue of characterizing the nature of SMGs (Egami et al., 2004; Greve et al., 2004, 2005; Smail et al., 2004; Swinbank et al., 2004, 2006, 2008; Takagi et al., 2004; Alexander et al., 2005; Borys et al., 2005; Kovács et al., 2006; Laurent et al., 2006; Pope et…”
MOST SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES ARE MAJOR MERGERS (2010, methodology): “Hainline (2008) (see also Hainline et al. 2010) derived the stellar masses of a large sample of SMGs, employing Spitzer observations to cover a significantly larger spectral range than earlier attempts (e.g. Smail et al. 2004).”
The X-Ray Spectral Properties of SCUBA Galaxies (2005, background): “Making reasonable assumptions about the duration of the submillimeter-bright phase in these systems, these results provide evidence that SMGs are the progenitors of local kM early-type galaxies (e.g., Lilly et al. 1999; Scott et al. 2002; Smail et al. 2004; Chapman et al. 2005).”
An interferometric CO survey of luminous submillimetre galaxies (2005, background): “…of submm flux isbelieved to be due their higher dust temperatures (Blain et al.2004a; Chapman et al. 2005), have similar gas masses as classical SMGs (Swinbank et al. 2004; Smail et al. 2004), this would double our current estimate of the abundance of massive baryonic galaxies t high redshifts.”