Previous | Session 81 | Next
J.E. Aguirre (University of Colorado, Boulder), Bolocam-COSMOS Collaboration
A substantial fraction of the energy emitted when the Universe was young came from luminous galaxies largely hidden at optical wavelengths by shrouds of interstellar dust grains, and now resides in the FIR/mm cosmic background radiation. If the bulk of this millimeter emission is powered by radiation from stars, then about half of the stars that have formed by the present day could have formed in dust-obscured systems.
These systems are best detected at mm wavelengths, and BOLOCAM, the large format bolometer array on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) which operates at 1.1 mm, will detect scores of such sources. Here we present initial results from our BOLOCAM survey of a sub-region of the COSMOS field, the central 1000 sq. arcmin. mapped to date. We present diagnostics of the data, noise estimates, and Monte Carlo simulations to characterize the survey parameters, as well as candidate source detections at the bright end of the luminosity function. We use the full suite of COSMOS data available at complementary wavelengths (X-ray,optical/near-infrared and radio) to characterize the properties of their host galaxies. BOLOCAM will provide an alternative view of the COSMOS in that it will unveil the regions of dust-obscured starformation and black hole accretion.
This research is funded in part by grants from the NSF (AST-0206158, AST-0098737 and AST-0205937 ) and NASA (NGT5-50384).
Previous | Session 81 | Next
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.