Luminous submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) have been known for some time to produce a substantial fraction of the far-IR/submillimeter background. New observations show that these systems are not only very luminous, but also very massive. Here we present results from (a) a survey of SMGs' molecular line emission, which has confirmed Keck optical redshifts and revealed their high gas and dynamical masses; and (b) a detailed case study of the rest-frame optical emission from one SMG, which has revealed its high metallicity and old stellar population. We infer a high z~2.7 comoving number density of galaxies with baryonic masses greater than 10^11 solar masses; this is not accounted for in current semi-analytic models of galaxy evolution.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0403183,
title = {Submillimeter Galaxies as Tracers of Mass Assembly at Large M},
author = {R. Genzel and A. J. Baker and R. J. Ivison and F. Bertoldi and A. W. Blain and S. C. Chapman and P. Cox and R. I. Davies and F. Eisenhauer and D. T. Frayer and T. Greve and M. D. Lehnert and D. Lutz and N. Nesvadba and R. Neri and A. Omont and S. Seitz and I. Smail and L. J. Tacconi and M. Tecza and N. A. Thatte and R. Bender},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0403183},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the Venice conference "Multiwavelength Mapping of Galaxy Formation and Evolution". A version with a higher-quality Figure 2 is available at http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~ajb/RGVenice-full.ps.gz