Scientific Promise and Instrument Concepts for a Background-Limited Infrared-Submillimeter Spectrograph (BLISS) for SPICA

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Scientific paper

The far-IR component of the cosmic background light is the product of dust-enshrouded energy release integrated over the history of stars and galaxies. The fact that the energy in this dust component is comparable to that in the optical / near-IR component means that on average in the universe, interstellar dust has absorbed and reradiated half of the total energy ever generated by stars and black-hole accretion. The first high-redshift dusty galaxies discovered offer a clue: they have properties similar to those of the local luminous and ultraluminous IR galaxies (LIRGs and ULIRGs). The next generation continuum surveys will discover tens of thousands of similar galaxies at various post-reionization redshifts as the bulk of the background is resolved into its constituent sources.
The key to studying these galaxies will be spectroscopy in the mid-IR through millimeter range. Gas-phase and solid-state spectral features in this band provide redshifts, gas masses, and physical conditions from which luminosities, stellar populations, and star formation histories are derived independent of dust extinction. Unfortunately, such measurements in galaxies to redshift 5 are not possible with currently-planned far-IR instrumentation -they require a large (> 1 meter), actively-cooled telescope, and a zodiacal-light-limited spectrograph.
Given recent technological advances, we can now anticipate this opportunity for the first time. We present a far-IR spectrograph concept for the Japanese SPICA mission. The background-limited infrared-submillimeter spectrograph (BLISS) is a suite of broadband, moderate resolution (R˜1000) spectrograph modules covering 40-600 microns, with excellent sensitivity to take advantage of the cold telescope. BLISS will utilize the world's most sensitive far-IR/submillimeter detectors as well as novel sub-K cooler and multiplexer technologies. The combination of BLISS with SPICA will offer broadband coverage and sensitivities at or better than 1e-20 W/m2 in modest integrations, enabling spectral studies throughout the era of peak activity in galaxies.

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