The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies

Details The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies

2009-12-02

arxiv.org/abs/0912.0376v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to MNRAS-let

Scientific paper

The largest galaxies acquire their mass early on, when the Universe is still youthful. Cold streams violently feed these young galaxies a vast amount of fresh gas, resulting in very efficient star formation. Using a well resolved hydrodynamical simulation of galaxy formation, we demonstrate that these mammoth galaxies are already in place a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. Contrary to local starforming galaxies, where dust re-emits a large part of the stellar ultraviolet (UV) light at infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths, our self-consistent modelling of dust extinction predicts that a substantial fraction of UV photons should escape from primordial galaxies. Such a model allows us to compute reliably the number of high redshift objects as a function of luminosity, and yields galaxies whose UV luminosities closely match those measured in the deepest observational surveys available. This agreement is remarkably good considering our admittedly still simple modelling of the interstellar medium (ISM) physics. The luminosity functions (LF) of virtual UV luminous galaxies coincide with the existing data over the whole redshift range from 4 to 7, provided cosmological parameters are set to their currently favoured values. Despite their considerable emission at short wavelengths, we anticipate that the counterparts of the brightest UV galaxies will be detected by future sub-millimetre facilities like ALMA

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and The dusty, albeit ultraviolet bright infancy of galaxies will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-508746