Monday, September 10, 2012

1209.1390 (Mark Swinbank et al.)

An ALMA survey of Sub-millimetre Galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: Detection of [C II] at z=4.4    [PDF]

Mark Swinbank, Alexander Karim, Ian Smail, Jackie Hodge, Fabian Walter, Frank Bertoldi, Andy Biggs, Carlos De Breuck, Scott Chapman, Kristen Coppin, Pierre Cox, Alice Danielson, Helmut Dannerbauer, Rob Ivison, Thomas Greve, Kirsten Knudsen, Karl Menten, James Simpson, Eva Schinnerer, Julie Wardlow, Axel Weiss, Paul van der Werf
We present ALMA 870-um (345GHz) observations of two sub-millimetre galaxies (SMGs) drawn from an ALMA study of the 126 sub-millimeter sources from the LABOCA Extended Chandra Deep Field South Survey (LESS). The ALMA data identify the counterparts to these previously unidentified sub-millimeter sources and serendipitously detect bright emission lines in their spectra which we show are most likely to be [C II]157.74um emission yielding redshifts of z=4.42 and z=4.44. This blind detection rate within the 7.5-GHz bandpass of ALMA is consistent with the previously derived photometric redshift distribution of SMGs and suggests a modest, but not dominant (<25%), tail of 870-um selected SMGs at z>4. We find that the ratio of L_CII/L_FIR in these SMGs is much higher than seen for similarly far-infrared-luminous galaxies at z~0, which is attributed to the more extended gas reservoirs in these high-redshift ULIRGs. Indeed, in one system we show that the [C II] emission shows hints of extended emission on >3kpc scales. Finally, we use the volume probed by our ALMA survey to show that the bright end of the [C II] luminosity function evolves strongly between z=0 and z~4.4, reflecting the increased ISM cooling in galaxies as a result of their higher star-formation rates. These observations demonstrate that even with short integrations, ALMA is able to detect the dominant fine structure cooling lines from high-redshift ULIRGs, measure their energetics and trace their evolution with redshift.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1390

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