Investigating the formation of the most massive galaxies in the Universe with millimetre surveys

The most massive galaxies we observe in the Universe today are believed to have formed via a giant dust-obscured burst of star formation at redshift z > 3, when the Universe was less than 2 billion years old. Detecting those massive galaxies in their forming process requires observations at long wavelengths in order to "see" the dust-reprocessed starlight from the new born stars.
Surveys performed at sub-millimetre wavelengths with the Herschel space observatory have detected a large number of dust-obscured galaxies out to z~3. However above that redshift the source confusion and the dimming of light due to the distance only allows Herschel to identify the most extreme representative of the progenitors of present-day massive galaxies.
New cameras are currently under construction to explore the extragalactic Universe at millimetre wavelengths: one, MUSCAT, is being build here in Cardiff and another one, TOLTEC, is under development in USA. Both cameras will be mounted on the 50-meters Large Millimetre Telescope (LMT) in Mexico. Observations at millimetre wavelengths have a key advantage compared to those carried out at shorter wavelengths: the observed luminosity of a dust-obscured galaxy in the millimetre bands is weakly dependent on redshift. In fact, the dimming of light due to the distance is compensated by the sampling of rest-frame frequencies that are closer to the peak of the dust emission. In this way very distant galaxies are as ease to detect as lower redshift ones.
By exploiting this unique property, together with a better sensitivity than Herschel, both MUSCAT and TOLTEC will detect thousands of dust-obscured galaxies from z~3 to z~6, including dusty proto-clusters and lensed galaxies. These new data will allow us to better understand the formation of the most massive galaxies and structures in the Universe.
The student will contribute to the analysis and interpretation of these new data by carrying out statistical and multi-wavelength analysis of high redshift dust-obscured galaxies. He/she will interpret the new measurement using a semi-analytic model currently under development in Cardiff. He/she will also use the model to guide the interpretation of upcoming data collected by the James Webb space telescope and to make predictions for the observations to be carried out with the Square Kilometer Array and other future facilities.

This project will also be supervised by Dr Giulia Rodighiero from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padova (Italy).

Consideration is automatic upon application for admission to the Doctor of Philosophy in Physics and Astronomy with an October 2019 start date.

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