HERSCHEL-ATLAS GALAXY COUNTS AND HIGH-REDSHIFT LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS: THE FORMATION OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES

By A. Lapi, J. González-Nuevo, L. Fan, A. Bressan, G. Zotti, L. Danese, Mattia Negrello, L. Dunne, S. Eales, S. Maddox and 28 more. 2011

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Exploiting the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey Science Demonstration Phase survey data, we have determined the luminosity functions (LFs) at rest-frame wavelengths of 100 and 250 μm and at several redshifts z ≳ 1, for bright submillimeter galaxies with star formation rates (SFRs)  ≳  100 M☉ yr−1. We find that the evolution of the comoving LF is strong up to z ≈ 2.5, and slows down at higher redshifts. From the LFs and the information on halo masses inferred from clustering analysis, we derived an average relation between SFR and halo mass (and its scatter). We also infer that the timescale of the main episode of dust-enshrouded star formation in massive halos (MH ≳ 3 × 1012 M☉) amounts to ∼7 × 108 yr. Given the SFRs, which are in the range of 102–103 M☉ yr−1, this timescale implies final stellar masses of the order of 1011–1012 M☉. The corresponding stellar mass function matches the observed mass function of passively evolving galaxies at z ≳ 1. The comparison of the statistics for submillimeter and UV-selected galaxies suggests that the dust-free, UV bright phase is ≳ 102 times shorter than the submillimeter bright phase, implying that the dust must form soon after the onset of star formation. Using a single reference spectral energy distribution (SED; the one of the z ≈ 2.3 galaxy SMM J2135-0102), our simple physical model is able to reproduce not only the LFs at different redshifts >1 but also the counts at wavelengths ranging from 250 μm to ≈1 mm. Owing to the steepness of the counts and their relatively broad frequency range, this result suggests that the dispersion of submillimeter SEDs of z > 1 galaxies around the reference one is rather small.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9705a40a15c159d19167f10ffeb34c5698bdfcd4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. M. Alexander
2. L. Hernquist
3. P. Hopkins
4. E. Daddi
5. D. Elbaz
6. D. Lutz
7. A. Cooray
8. A. Renzini

In Instrumentation

1. E. Daddi
2. A. Renzini
3. L. Hernquist
4. P. Hopkins
5. D. Elbaz
6. D. M. Alexander
7. D. Lutz
8. C. Conroy

Citations in the corpus

• The VISTA deep extragalactic observations (VIDEO) survey (2012, background): “…important to note that the epoch over which VIDEO is aimed is a crucial one in the history of the Universe, as this is when the bulk of the star formation (e.g. Madau et al. 1996; Hopkins & Beacom 2006; Lapi et al. 2011) and accretion (e.g. Ueda et al. 2003; Croom et al. 2009) activity took place.”
• A UNIFIED EMPIRICAL MODEL FOR INFRARED GALAXY COUNTS BASED ON THE OBSERVED PHYSICAL EVOLUTION OF DISTANT GALAXIES (2012, background): “…infrared (IR) number counts, phenomenological or hybrid models (e.g. Béthermin et al. 2011; Gruppioni et al. 2011; Rahmati & van der Werf 2011; Lapi et al. 2011) fare better but are in general descriptive and use an evolution of the luminosity function which is not motivated by physical…”
• The Herschel* PEP/HerMES luminosity function - I. Probing the evolution of PACS selected Galaxies to z ≃ 4 (2013, methodology): “In Section 3.2 we also note that the different (far-IR) photo-z approach of Lapi et al. (2011) produces consistent LF results in the common part of parameter space.”
• PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission): an extended white paper (2013, methodology): “e covered range. Moreover, measurements of the complete far-IR to mm-wave SEDs will vastly improve the accuracy of photometric redshift estimates that have a rms error of ˇ0:2(1 + z) with SPIRE alone [119]. This means that thePRISM survey will allow us to characterize with high statistical accuracy ”
• An Extreme Protocluster of Luminous Dusty Starbursts in the Early Universe (2017, background): “Relatively long starburst lifetimes have been reported in the past (Granato et al. 2004; Lapi et al. 2011), while others have reported the presence of galaxies in high-redshift clusters whose scatter in age is only a few hundreds megayears (Andreon et al. 2014).”
• The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths (2012, methodology): “Much improved models, successfully reproducing the recent data, are now available both for the epoch-dependent luminosity function (hence for the source counts; e.g. Béthermin et al. 2011; Lapi et al. 2011) and for the clustering properties (e.g. Xia et al. 2012; Pénin et al. 2012).”