AAS 206th Meeting, 29 May - 2 June 2005
Session 16 Galaxy Surveys
Oral, Monday, 10:00-11:30am, May 30, 2005, 102 E

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[16.02] The 1.1 mm Bolocam Lockman Hole Galaxy Survey: Submillimeter Confirmations and Fluctuation Analysis

J. Glenn, J. E. Aguirre, G.T. Laurent, P.R. Maloney, P. Stover (University of Colorado), S.F. Edgington, S.R. Golwala, A.E. Lange, P. Rossinot, J. Sayers (California Institute of Technology), J.J. Bock, A. Goldin, H. Nguyen (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), P.A.R. Ade, D. Haig, P.D. Mauskopf (University of Cardiff)

Submillimeter galaxies are high redshift (z>1), high luminosity (~1013 Lsolar) galaxies with large inferred star formation rates (~103 Msolar per year). Such extreme star formation rates make it important to characterize this population of galaxies to understand massive galaxy formation.

We surveyed 324 square arcminutes of sky for submillimeter galaxies at 1.1 mm toward the Lockman Hole, using Bolocam on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. We previously reported the detection of seventeen galaxy candidates (with seven expected false detections). Here we report: 1) the detection of nine of the galaxy candidates at 350 microns with SHARC-2 and 2) the results of a fluctuation analysis (P(D), where P is the probability of a signal deflection D). The nine 350 micron detections confirm the robustness of the 1.1 mm detections. Together with far-infrared, submillimeter, millimeter, and VLA data, where available, these observations sample the spectral energy distributions for estimates of luminosities and star formation rates.

The P(D) analysis was enabled by the extremely uniform noise in the map, resulting from the build-up of the map with repetitive scans of the same patch of sky with even sampling. In a P(D) analysis, the histogram of map pixel values is compared to a histogram comprised of random realizations of noise summed with galaxies drawn from a model distribution. A broad range of power law models were tested. The best fit power law (N=N0S-a) has a well-constrained spectral index of a=2.7. The uncertainty in the normalization N0 is dominated by systematic calibration uncertainties. This is in broad agreement with previous observations and theoretical predictions, but with much tighter error bars.

This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation.


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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #2
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