WISE Discovery of Hyper Luminous Galaxies at z=2-4 and Their Implications for Galaxy and AGN Evolution
Abstract
On behalf of the WISE Science team, we present the discovery of a class of distant dust-enshrouded galaxies with extremely high luminosity. These galaxies are selected to have extreme red colors in the mid-IR using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). They are faint in the optical and near-IR, predominantly at z=2-4, and with IR luminosity > , making them Hyper-Luminous Infrared Galaxies (HyLIRGs). SEDs incorporating the WISE, Spitzer, and Herschel PACS and SPIRE photometry indicate hot dust dominates the bolometric luminosity, presumably powered by AGN. Preliminary multi-wavelength follow-up suggests that they are different from normal populations in the local M-sigma relation. Their low source density implies that these objects are either intrinsically rare, or a short-lived phase in a more numerous population. If the latter is the case, these hot, dust-enshrouded galaxies may be an early stage in the interplay between AGN and galaxies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.0120,
title = {WISE Discovery of Hyper Luminous Galaxies at z=2-4 and Their Implications for Galaxy and AGN Evolution},
author = {Chao-Wei Tsai and Peter Eisenhardt and Jingwen Wu and Carrie Bridge and Roberto Assef and Dominic Benford and Andrew Blain and Roc Cutri and Roger L. Griffith and Thomas Jarrett and Carol Lonsdale and Sara Petty and Jack Sayers and Adam Stanford and Daniel Stern and Edward L. Wright and Lin Yan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0120},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings of the Conference of "Galaxy Mergers in an Evolving Universe", Hualien, Taiwan, October 23-28, 2011