Thursday, May 18, 2006, Pratt Conference Room at 11:00 pm
>>> Note special time; there is a 12:30 pm seminar, too <<<
Submillimeter Galaxy Studies
with the 1.1mm AzTEC Instrument on
the LMT
Dr. Grant Wilson (UMass/Amherst)
|
The submm galaxy population is thought to be responsible for the vast
majority of star formation at high redshifts. However, since its
discovery in the late 1990s, relatively little progress has been made
in quantifying the physical properties of the host galaxies and
understanding their place in a cosmological context. This is
primarily due to source confusion, cosmic variance, and an overall
paucity of high S/N submm galaxy detections.
AzTEC is a 144 element bolometer array that operates at 1.1mm. The camera is destined to be a first-generation instrument for the Large Millimeter Telescope but was installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) for three months beginning in November 2005. During that period we undertook what is by far the largest suite of observations designed to detect submm galaxies. In all, over 1 square degree of sky was observed to a depth of 1mJy/beam (1 sigma rms) or better - more than quadrupling the amount of sky mapped to this depth. Both blank fields and fields of known mass overdensities were imaged. Data analysis and source identification is now ongoing. In this talk I will describe the motivations and extents of the AzTEC surveys and show very preliminary results for some of our fields. |
