Breaking the Redshift Deadlock - I: Constraining the star formation history of galaxies with sub-millimetre photometric redshifts
Abstract
Future extragalactic sub-millimetre and millimetre surveys have the potential to provide a sensitive census of the level of obscured star formation in galaxies at all redshifts. While in general there is good agreement between the source counts from existing SCUBA (850um) and MAMBO (1.25mm) surveys of different depths and areas, it remains difficult to determine the redshift distribution and bolometric luminosities of the sub-millimetre and millimetre galaxy population. This is principally due to the ambiguity in identifying an individual sub-millimetre source with its optical, IR or radio counterpart which, in turn, prevents a confident measurement of the spectroscopic redshift. Additionally, the lack of data measuring the rest-frame FIR spectral peak of the sub-millimetre galaxies gives rise to poor constraints on their rest-frame FIR luminosities and star formation rates. In this paper we describe simulations that demonstrate how photometric redshifts derived from future sub-millimetre experiments, in particular the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimetre Telescope and the Herschel satellite, can constrain the global star formation rates for luminous galaxies [L(FIR) > 3 x 10^12 L(sun)] with an accuracy of ~20% at redshifts 0.5 < z < 5.5.Keywords
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