News & Events

Adi Zolotov
CCPP

tba

Josh Younger
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

What can we learn about submillimeter galaxies from high resolution interferometric imaging?Over the past decade, it has become clear that a significant fraction of the far infrared extragalactic background is produced by high redshift starbursts. First revealed by SCUBA at the JCMT, submillimeter galaxies are now known to be massive, dusty, extremely luminous merging systems that may represent massive galaxies in formation. However, a detailed understanding of these objects has been hindered in part by the relatively poor resolution of submillimeter cameras. Over the past couple of years, the Submillimeter Array has produced a flux-limited sample of 15 SMGs with 2 arcsec resolution (positions accurate to ~0.2 arcsec) that enable counterpart identification at other wavelengths observed with similarly high angular resolution. These unambiguous counterparts provide evidence for a population of extremely luminous systems at higher redshift (z > 3.5) than more commonly studied samples; a result that could have important consequences for models of galaxy formation and evolution. At the same time, recent imaging at even higher resolution (~0.3 arcsec, or 3x better) has provided measurements of the physical scale of the far infrared emission in two of the most luminous SMGs known. By way of a series of simplifying assumptions, we find evidence that these z~4 hyperluminous starbursts are radiating at close to or at their Eddington limit, and may constrain models of star formation and feedback in the most extreme environments.

Kim-Vy Tran
University of Zurich

TBATBA

Michael Fall
STScI

tba

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No Astro Seminar October 31

Martin Pessah
Institute for Advanced Study

TBATBA

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No Astro Seminar November 28