ABSTRACT We combine wide and deep galaxy number-count data from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly, COSMOS/G10, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Early Release Science, HST UVUDF, and various near-, mid-, and ...far-IR data sets from ESO, Spitzer, and Herschel. The combined data range from the far UV (0.15 m) to far-IR (500 m), and in all cases the contribution to the integrated galaxy light (IGL) of successively fainter galaxies converges. Using a simple spline fit, we derive the IGL and the extrapolated IGL in all bands. We argue that undetected low-surface-brightness galaxies and intracluster/group light are modest, and that our extrapolated-IGL measurements are an accurate representation of the extragalactic background light (EBL). Our data agree with most earlier IGL estimates and with direct measurements in the far IR, but disagree strongly with direct estimates in the optical. Close agreement between our results and recent very high-energy experiments (H.E.S.S. and MAGIC) suggests that there may be an additional foreground affecting the direct estimates. The most likely culprit could be the adopted model of zodiacal light. Finally we use a modified version of the two-component model to integrate the EBL and obtain measurements of the cosmic optical background (COB) and cosmic infrared background of nW m−2 sr−1 and nW m−2 sr−1 respectively (48%:52%). Over the next decade, upcoming space missions such as Euclid and the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope will have the capacity to reduce the COB error to <1%, at which point comparisons to the very high-energy data could have the potential to provide a direct detection and measurement of the reionization field.
Abstract
We use the energy-balance code magphys to determine stellar and dust masses, and dust corrected star formation rates for over 200 000 GAMA galaxies, 170 000 G10-COSMOS galaxies, and 200 000 ...3D-HST galaxies. Our values agree well with previously reported measurements and constitute a representative and homogeneous data set spanning a broad range in stellar-mass (108–1012 M⊙), dust-mass (106–109 M⊙), and star formation rates (0.01–100 M⊙yr−1), and over a broad redshift range (0.0 < z < 5.0). We combine these data to measure the cosmic star formation history (CSFH), the stellar-mass density (SMD), and the dust-mass density (DMD) over a 12 Gyr timeline. The data mostly agree with previous estimates, where they exist, and provide a quasi-homogeneous data set using consistent mass and star formation estimators with consistent underlying assumptions over the full time range. As a consequence our formal errors are significantly reduced when compared to the historic literature. Integrating our CSFH we precisely reproduce the SMD
with an interstellar medium replenishment factor of 0.50 ± 0.07, consistent with our choice of Chabrier initial mass function plus some modest amount of stripped stellar mass. Exploring the cosmic dust density evolution, we find a gradual increase in dust density with lookback time. We build a simple phenomenological model from the CSFH to account for the dust-mass evolution, and infer two key conclusions: (1) For every unit of stellar mass which is formed 0.0065–0.004 units of dust mass is also formed. (2) Over the history of the Universe approximately 90–95 per cent of all dust formed has been destroyed and/or ejected.
We present the largest submillimeter images that have been made of the extragalactic sky. The Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) is a survey of 660 deg2 with the PACS and ...SPIRE cameras in five photometric bands: 100, 160, 250, 350, and 500 m. In this paper we present the images from our two largest fields, which account for ∼75% of the survey. The first field is 180.1 deg2 in size, centered on the north Galactic pole (NGP), and the second is 317.6 deg2 in size, centered on the south Galactic pole. The NGP field serendipitously contains the Coma cluster. Over most (∼80%) of the images, the pixel noise, including both instrumental noise and confusion noise, is approximately 3.6, and 3.5 mJy pix−1 at 100 and 160 m, and 11.0, 11.1 and 12.3 mJy beam−1 at 250, 350 and 500 m, respectively, but reaches lower values in some parts of the images. If a matched filter is applied to optimize point-source detection, our total 1 map sensitivity is 5.7, 6.0, and 7.3 mJy at 250, 350, and 500 m, respectively. We describe the results of an investigation of the noise properties of the images. We make the most precise estimate of confusion in SPIRE maps to date, finding values of 3.12 0.07, 4.13 0.02, and 4.45 0.04 mJy beam−1 at 250, 350, and 500 m in our un-convolved maps. For PACS we find an estimate of the confusion noise in our fast-parallel observations of 4.23 and 4.62 mJy beam−1 at 100 and 160 m. Finally, we give recipes for using these images to carry out photometry, both for unresolved and extended sources.
Abstract
The Herschel Space Observatory has revealed a very different galaxyscape from that shown by optical surveys which presents a challenge for galaxy-evolution models. The Herschel surveys ...reveal (1) that there was rapid galaxy evolution in the very recent past and (2) that galaxies lie on a single Galaxy Sequence (GS) rather than a star-forming ‘main sequence’ and a separate region of ‘passive’ or ‘red-and-dead’ galaxies. The form of the GS is now clearer because far-infrared surveys such as the Herschel ATLAS pick up a population of optically red star-forming galaxies that would have been classified as passive using most optical criteria. The space-density of this population is at least as high as the traditional star-forming population. By stacking spectra of H-ATLAS galaxies over the redshift range 0.001 < z < 0.4, we show that the galaxies responsible for the rapid low-redshift evolution have high stellar masses, high star-formation rates but, even several billion years in the past, old stellar populations – they are thus likely to be relatively recent ancestors of early-type galaxies in the Universe today. The form of the GS is inconsistent with rapid quenching models and neither the analytic bathtub model nor the hydrodynamical EAGLE simulation can reproduce the rapid cosmic evolution. We propose a new gentler model of galaxy evolution that can explain the new Herschel results and other key properties of the galaxy population.
In this work we present IRAM 30-m telescope observations of a sample of bulge-dominated galaxies with large dust lanes, which have had a recent minor merger. We find these galaxies are very gas rich, ...with H2 masses between 4 × 108 and 2 × 1010 M⊙. We use these molecular gas masses, combined with atomic gas masses from an accompanying paper, to calculate gas-to-dust and gas-to-stellar-mass ratios. The gas-to-dust ratios of our sample objects vary widely (between ≈50 and 750), suggesting many objects have low gas-phase metallicities, and thus that the gas has been accreted through a recent merger with a lower mass companion. We calculate the implied minor companion masses and gas fractions, finding a median predicted stellar mass ratio of ≈40:1. The minor companion likely had masses between ≈107 and 1010 M⊙. The implied merger mass ratios are consistent with the expectation for low-redshift gas-rich mergers from simulations. We then go on to present evidence that (no matter which star formation rate indicator is used) our sample objects have very low star formation efficiencies (star formation rate per unit gas mass), lower even than the early-type galaxies from ATLAS3D which already show a suppression. This suggests that minor mergers can actually suppress star formation activity. We discuss mechanisms that could cause such a suppression, include dynamical effects induced by the minor merger.
Submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at are luminous in the far-infrared, and have star formation rates, SFR, of hundreds to thousands of solar masses per year. However, it is unclear whether they are true ...analogs of local ULIRGs or whether the mode of their star formation is more similar to that in local disk galaxies. We target these questions by using Herschel-PACS to examine the conditions in the interstellar medium (ISM) in far-infrared luminous SMGs at -4. We present 70-160 m photometry and spectroscopy of the O iv26 m, Fe ii26 m, S iii33 m, Si ii34 m, O iii52 m, N iii57 m, and O i63 m fine-structure lines and the S(0) and S(1) hydrogen rotational lines in 13 lensed SMGs identified by their brightness in early Herschel data. Most of the 13 targets are not individually spectroscopically detected; we instead focus on stacking these spectra with observations of an additional 32 SMGs from the Herschel archive-representing a complete compilation of PACS spectroscopy of SMGs. We detect O i63 m, Si ii34 m, and N iii57 m at in the stacked spectra, determining that the average strengths of these lines relative to the far-IR continuum are , , and , respectively. Using the O iii52 m/N iii57 m emission line ratio, we show that SMGs have average gas-phase metallicities . By using PDR modeling and combining the new spectral measurements with integrated far-infrared fluxes and existing C ii158 m data, we show that SMGs have average gas densities, n, of and FUV field strengths, (in Habing units: ), consistent with both local ULIRGs and lower luminosity star-forming galaxies.
We present new results from the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) Local Universe Galaxy Survey (SLUGS), the first large systematic submillimetre (submm) survey of the local Universe. ...Since our initial survey of a sample of 104 IRAS-selected galaxies we have now completed a survey of a sample of 81 optically selected galaxies, observed with the SCUBA camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Since SCUBA is sensitive to the 90 per cent of dust too cold to radiate significantly in the IRAS bands our new sample represents the first unbiased SCUBA survey of dust in galaxies along the whole length of the Hubble sequence. We find little change in the properties of dust in galaxies along the Hubble sequence, except a marginally significant trend for early-type galaxies to be less-luminous submm sources than late types. We nevertheless detected six out of 11 elliptical galaxies, although some of the emission may possibly be synchrotron rather than dust emission. As in our earlier work on IRAS galaxies we find that the IRAS and submm fluxes are well fitted by a two-component dust model with dust emissivity index β= 2. The major difference from our earlier work is that we find the ratio of the mass of cold dust to the mass of warm dust is much higher for our optically selected galaxies and can reach values of ∼1000. Comparison of the results for the IRAS and optically selected samples shows that there is a population of galaxies containing a large proportion of cold dust that is unrepresented in the IRAS sample. We derive local submm luminosity and dust mass functions, both directly from our optically selected SLUGS sample, and by extrapolation from the IRAS Point Source Catalogue Redshift Survey (PSCz) survey using the method of Serjeant and Harrison (by extrapolating the spectral energy distributions of the IRAS PSCz survey galaxies out to 850 μm we probe a wider range of luminosities than probed directly by the SLUGS samples), and find excellent agreement between the two. We find them to be well fitted by Schechter functions except at the highest luminosities. We find that as a consequence of the omission of cold galaxies from the IRAS sample the luminosity function presented in our earlier work is too low by a factor of 2, reducing the amount of cosmic evolution required between the low-z and high-z Universe.
Interstellar dust in galaxies can be traced either through its extinction effects on the star light or through its thermal emission at infrared wavelengths. Recent radiative transfer studies of ...several nearby edge-on galaxies have found an apparent inconsistency in the dust energy balance: the radiative transfer models that successfully explain the optical extinction underestimate the observed fluxes by an average factor of 3. We investigate the dust energy balance for IC 4225 and NGC 5166, two edge-on spiral galaxies observed by the Herschel Space Observatory in the frame of the H-ATLAS survey. We start from models which were constrained from optical data and extend them to construct the entire spectral energy distribution of our galaxies. These predicted values are subsequently compared to the observed far-infrared fluxes. We find that including a young stellar population in the modelling is necessary as it plays a non-negligible part in the heating of the dust grains. While the modelling approach for both galaxies is nearly identical, we find two very different results. As is often seen in other edge-on spiral galaxies, the far-infrared emission of our radiative transfer model of IC 4225 underestimates the observed fluxes by a factor of about 3. For NGC 5166 on the other hand, we find that both the predicted spectral energy distribution as well as the simulated images match the observations particularly well. We explore possible reasons for this difference and conclude that it is unlikely that one single mechanism is the cause of the dust energy balance problem in spiral galaxies. We discuss the different approaches that can be considered in order to get a conclusive answer on the origin this discrepancy.
The largest Herschel extragalactic surveys, H-ATLAS and HerMES, have selected a sample of "ultrared" dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) with rising SPIRE flux densities (S500 > S350 > S250; the ...so-called "500 m risers") as an efficient way for identifying DSFGs at higher redshift (z > 4). In this paper, we present a large Spitzer follow-up program of 300 Herschel ultrared DSFGs. We have obtained high-resolution Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, Northern Extended Millimeter Array, and SMA data for 63 of them, which allow us to securely identify the Spitzer/IRAC counterparts and classify them as gravitationally lensed or unlensed. Within the 63 ultrared sources with high-resolution data, ∼65% appear to be unlensed and ∼27% are resolved into multiple components. We focus on analyzing the unlensed sample by directly performing multiwavelength spectral energy distribution modeling to derive their physical properties and compare with the more numerous z ∼ 2 DSFG population. The ultrared sample has a median redshift of 3.3, stellar mass of 3.7 × 1011 M , star formation rate (SFR) of 730 M yr−1, total dust luminosity of 9.0 × 1012 L , dust mass of 2.8 × 109 M , and V-band extinction of 4.0, which are all higher than those of the ALESS DSFGs. Based on the space density, SFR density, and stellar mass density estimates, we conclude that our ultrared sample cannot account for the majority of the star-forming progenitors of the massive, quiescent galaxies found in infrared surveys. Our sample contains the rarer, intrinsically most dusty, luminous, and massive galaxies in the early universe that will help us understand the physical drivers of extreme star formation.
Deep surveys in many wavebands have shown that the rate at which stars were forming was at least a factor of 10 higher at redshifts >1 than today. Heavy elements (‘metals’) are produced by stars, and ...the star formation history deduced by these surveys implies that a significant fraction of all metals in the Universe today should already exist at z∼ 2–3. However, only 10 per cent of the total metals expected to exist at this redshift have so far been accounted for (in damped Lyman α absorbers and the Lyman forest). In this paper, we use the results of submillimetre surveys of the local and high-redshift Universe to show that there was much more dust in galaxies in the past. We find that a large proportion of the missing metals are traced by this dust, bringing the metals implied from the star formation history and observations into agreement. We also show that the observed distribution of dust masses at high redshift can be reproduced remarkably well by a simple model for the evolution of dust in spheroids, suggesting that the descendants of the dusty galaxies found in deep submillimetre surveys are the relatively dust-free spiral bulges and ellipticals in the Universe today.
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