Planck & Herschel unveil extreme submillimeter structures
Abstract
Planck is the first FIR/sub-mm all sky survey with the sensitivity required to systematically identify the rarest, most luminous high-redshift sub-mm sources on the sky, either strongly gravitationally lensed galaxies, or the joint FIR/sub-mm emission from multiple intense starbursts as expected for the most massive, most rapidly collapsing dark-matter environments in the early Universe. We use a color selection to identify a population of 500 bright, high-fidelity Planck high-z candidates, 180 of which we are now following up with Herschel/SPIRE, including an extraordinary allocation of ``Must Do'' Director's Discretionary Time. All of our sources have typical SPIRE colors of high-z galaxies, and the redshifts of several have already been confirmed spectroscopically. We will use Spitzer/IRAC to identify and analyze the stellar counterparts of 35 of these sources, aided (but not replaced) by existing and scheduled ground-based optical/NIR photometry. This will allow us to measure photometric redshifts, stellar masses, star formation histories and stellar ages of these sources. We will search for candidate member galaxies of nascent galaxy clusters, and prepare detailed spectroscopic follow-up. At what cosmic epoch did massive galaxy clusters form most of their stars? Will we find that star formation is more or less vigorous in these galaxies compared to galaxies in the field? Is the upper end of the ``red sequence'' already in place? These are only some of the questions that IRAC will help us address.
- Publication:
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Spitzer Proposal
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012sptz.prop90111D