Tuesday, January 15, 2013

1301.2596 (Yoichi Tamura et al.)

Obscured star formation in Ly-alpha blobs at z = 3.1    [PDF]

Yoichi Tamura, Yuichi Matsuda, Soh Ikarashi, Kimberly S. Scott, Bunyo Hatsukade, Hideki Umehata, Tomoki Saito, Kouichiro Nakanishi, Min S. Yun, Hajime Ezawa, David H. Hughes, Daisuke Iono, Ryohei Kawabe, Kotaro Kohno, Grant W. Wilson
We present results from the AzTEC/ASTE 1.1-mm imaging survey of 35 Ly-alpha blobs (LABs) found in the SSA22 protocluster at z = 3.1. These 1.1-mm data reach an r.m.s. noise level of 0.7-1 mJy/beam, making this the largest millimetre-wave survey of LABs to date. No significant (> 3.5-sigma) emission is found in any of individual 35 LABs, and from this, we estimate 3-sigma upper limits on the far-infrared luminosity of L_FIR < 2e+12 Lsun. Stacking analysis reveals that the 1.1-mm flux density averaged over the LABs is S(1.1mm) < 0.40 mJy (3-sigma), which places a constraint of L_FIR < 4.5e+11 Lsun. This indicates that earlier 850-um measurements of the LABs may have overestimated their flux densities. Our results suggest that LABs on average have little ultra-luminous obscured star-formation, in contrast to a long-believed picture that LABs undergo an intense episode of dusty star-formation activities with star-formation rates of ~ 10^3 Msun/yr. Observations with ALMA are needed to directly study the obscured part of star-formation activity in the LABs.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2596

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