Measurements of CO redshifts with Z-Spec for lensed submillimeter galaxies discovered in the H-ATLAS survey

Details Measurements of CO redshifts with Z-Spec for lensed submillimeter galaxies discovered in the H-ATLAS survey Measurements of CO redshifts with Z-Spec for lensed submillimeter galaxies discovered in the H-ATLAS survey

2010-09-29

arxiv.org/abs/1009.5983v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

44 pages, 12 figures, ApJ submitted

Scientific paper

We present new observations from Z-Spec, a broadband 185 - 305 GHz spectrometer, of sub-millimeter bright lensed sources recently detected by the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS). Four out of five sources observed were detected in CO, and their redshifts measured using a new redshift finding algorithm that uses combinations of the signal-to-noise of all the lines falling in the Z-Spec bandpass to determine redshifts with high confidence, even in cases where the signal-to-noise in individual lines is low. Lower limits for the dust masses (~a few 10^8 M_sun) and spatial extents (~1 kpc equivalent radius) are derived from the continuum spectral energy distributions, corresponding to dust temperatures between 54 and 69 K. The dust and gas properties, as determined by the CO line luminosities, are characteristic of dusty starburst galaxies, with star formation rates of 10^2-10^3 M_sun/yr. In the LTE approximation, we derive relatively low CO excitation temperature(<100 K) and optical depths (tau < 1). Using a maximum likelihood technique, we perform a non-LTE excitation analysis of the detected CO lines in each galaxy to further constrain the bulk molecular gas properties. We find that the mid-J CO lines measured by Z-Spec localize the best solutions to either a high-temperature / low-density region, or a low-temperature / high-density region near the LTE solution, with the optical depth varying accordingly.

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