EXTRAGALACTIC MILLIMETER-WAVE SOURCES IN SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY DATA: SOURCE COUNTS, CATALOG, AND STATISTICS FOR AN 87 SQUARE-DEGREE FIELD

By J. Vieira, T. Crawford, E. Switzer, P. Ade, K. Aird, M. Ashby, B. Benson, L. Bleem, M. Brodwin, J. Carlstrom and 45 more. 2009

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the results of an 87 deg2 point-source survey centered at R.A. 5h30m, decl. −55° taken with the South Pole Telescope at 1.4 and 2.0 mm wavelengths with arcminute resolution and milli-Jansky depth. Based on the ratio of flux in the two bands, we separate the detected sources into two populations, one consistent with synchrotron emission from active galactic nuclei and the other consistent with thermal emission from dust. We present source counts for each population from 11 to 640 mJy at 1.4 mm and from 4.4 to 800 mJy at 2.0 mm. The 2.0 mm counts are dominated by synchrotron-dominated sources across our reported flux range; the 1.4 mm counts are dominated by synchrotron-dominated sources above ∼15 mJy and by dust-dominated sources below that flux level. We detect 141 synchrotron-dominated sources and 47 dust-dominated sources at signal-to-noise ratio S/N >4.5 in at least one band. All of the most significantly detected members of the synchrotron-dominated population are associated with sources in previously published radio catalogs. Some of the dust-dominated sources are associated with nearby (z ≪ 1) galaxies whose dust emission is also detected by the Infrared Astronomy Satellite. However, most of the bright, dust-dominated sources have no counterparts in any existing catalogs. We argue that these sources represent the rarest and brightest members of the population commonly referred to as submillimeter galaxies (SMGs). Because these sources are selected at longer wavelengths than in typical SMG surveys, they are expected to have a higher mean redshift distribution and may provide a new window on galaxy formation in the early universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a3f2e1923e03b90ccaadede6944912e96470e84

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

A MEASUREMENT OF SECONDARY COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPIES WITH TWO YEARS OF SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS (2011, background): “The sky power at millimeter wavelengths and arcminute scales is dominated by the signal from bright synchrotron sources, with additional contributions from nearby infrared galaxies and a population of highredshift, gravitationally lensed, dusty, star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) (Vieira et al. 2010).”
The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths (2012, background): “…that allows a much better determination of the fluxdensity dependent distribution of spectral indices up to 20 GHz, as well as the high frequency counts and spectral information from the SPT survey at 150 and 220 GHz (Vieira et al. 2010) and from the ACT survey at 148 GHz (Marriage et al. 2011b).”
GRAVITATIONAL LENS MODELS BASED ON SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY IMAGING OF HERSCHEL-SELECTED STRONGLY LENSED SUB-MILLIMETER GALAXIES AT z > 1.5 (2013, methodology): “Objects with high magnification factors are preferentially selected to have small sizes by flux-limited surveys like those of Herschel and SPT.”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, background): “5, based on the assumption that the index obtained for brighter sources from ACT and SPT source catalogs [121, 188] holds for fainter sources.”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT 148 GHz IN THE 2008 SURVEY (2010, background): “Vieira et al. (2010) found that the lensed dusty population were characterized my maximum 150 GHz flux densities below 5 mJy range.”
A MEASUREMENT OF GRAVITATIONAL LENSING OF THE MICROWAVE BACKGROUND USING SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE DATA (2012, background): “Given that we remove sources in the 150 GHz SPT maps at thresholds of ∼ 10 mJy, we conclude that the non-Gaussian contribution of Poisson point sources are an insignificant source of bias on the lensing reconstruction.”
Submillimetre galaxies in a hierarchical universe: number counts, redshift distribution, and implications for the IMF (2012, background): “…the effect of lensing is more significant (Negrello et al. 2007; Paciga, Scott & Chapin 2009; Lima et al. 2010), and it would be incredibly difficult to explain the sources with mm flux density >10 mJy observed by Vieira et al. (2010) and Negrello et al. (2010) if they are not strongly lensed.”
GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT IN THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, methodology): “The simulated radio population follows the results of De Zotti et al. (2005), Vieira et al. (2010), and Reichardt et al. (2012).”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “Using previous measurements of the mm-wave point source population (Vieira et al. 2010; Shirokoff et al. 2011), we estimate that the power from residual point sources below this flux cut is Cℓ ∼ 1.3 × 10−5µK2, orDℓ ∼ 18 µK 2 ( ℓ 3000 )2 .”
A survey of molecular gas in luminous sub-millimetre galaxies (2012, methodology): “…of much wider field surveys at these wavelengths, including Herschel SPIRE at 500 μm (Chapman et al. 2010; Magnelli et al. 2010, 2012), in the millimetre waveband with the South Pole Telescope (Vieira et al. 2010) and surveys with the new SCUBA-2 camera (Holland et al., in preparation) on JCMT.”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE DAMPING TAIL OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POWER SPECTRUM WITH THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE (2011, methodology): “The foreground components are consistent with the measurements of Shirokoff et al. (2011) and Vieira et al. (2010), and the total power is consistent with the power spectrum presented in this analysis.”
SPTpol: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements with the South Pole Telescope (2012, background): “In November 2011, the SPT completed a 2500 deg(2) survey at 95, 150, and 220 GHz, the SPT-SZ survey, that has already led to significant results and new discoveries in three main areas: using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect to discover massive high-redshift galaxy clusters and constrain cosmologi”
HerMES: deep number counts at 250 μm, 350 μm and 500 μm in the COSMOS and GOODS-N fields and the build-up of the cosmic infrared background (2012, background): “It could be interpreted as a clue that the high redshift tail is due to lensed galaxies (see e.g. Vieira et al. 2010; Negrello et al. 2010), but the contribution of lensed galaxies in the Béthermin et al. (2011) model is negligible for a flux density cut of 20 mJy7.”