The Contribution of Faint Blue Galaxies to the Sub-mm Counts and Background

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 3 February 2000
Abstract
Observations in the submillimetre waveband have recently revealed a new population of luminous, sub-mm sources. These are proposed to lie at high redshift and are currently undetectable in the optical due to high intrinsic dust obscuration. Previous work on modelling deep galaxy counts from U to K bands have shown good agreement with a model based on Bruzual and Charlot galaxy evolution using an exponentially decaying star formation rate(SFR) with \tau=9Gyr and some dust obscuration (A_B\sim0.3) for spirals. We now show that by using either a 1/\lambda or Calzetti absorption law for the dust and re-distributing the evolved spiral galaxy radiation into the far infra-red(FIR), we can account for all of the faint(\leq1mJy) 850\mu m galaxy counts, but fail to fit 'bright'(\ge2mJy) sources, indicating that another explanation of the sub-mm counts may apply at brighter fluxes(e.g. QSOs, ULIRGs) The above model, using either dust law, can also explain a significant proportion of the extra-galactic background at 850\mu m as well as producing good fits to the 60\mu m IRAS counts.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: