Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21733510d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #335.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We examine the absorption of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons by formaldehyde (H2CO) over cosmic time. Centimeter-wave rotational transitions of H2CO become ``refrigerated'' by collisions with molecular hydrogen, driving their excitation temperatures below the CMB temperature. We demonstrate that the H2CO excitation and detectability is nearly independent of redshift or gas kinetic temperature. H2CO is thus a nearly distance-independent, extinction-free, molecular gas mass-limited tracer of galaxies and the cosmic star formation history. Moreover, H2CO line ratios provide a measurement of molecular gas density. A Formaldehyde Deep Field will be possible with large bandwidth sensitive radio interferometers such as the EVLA, spanning nearly the full history of star formation with uniform sensitivity in a single observation.
This research was supported by NSF grant AST-0707713.
Darling Jeremiah Kane
Zeiger Benjamin
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