Understanding the formation of the most massive galaxies in the Universe: from Herschel to the new generation of millimetre cameras

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 newborn stars.
Surveys performed at sub-millimetre wavelengths with the Herschel space observatory have detected a large number of dust-obscured galaxies out 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 built 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 at 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 measurements of number counts, luminosity function and clustering of high redshift dust-obscured galaxies. He/she will interpret the new measurement using a semi-analytic model currently under development here in Cardiff. He/she will also use the model to guide the interpretation of upcoming data collected by the James Webb spacet telescope and to make predictions for the observations to be carried out with the Square Kilometer Array and other future observatories.
The project will be carried out in collaboration with other institutes, like the Universities of Padova (Italy) and Bologna (Italy) and the International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS/SISSA) in Trieste (Italy), thus giving the student opportunities for travelling and for interacting with people outside UK.

This project will start on 01/10/2018