1. Characterizing the contribution of dust-obscured star formation at $z \gtrsim$ 5 using 18 serendipitously identified [CII] emitters
- Author
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van Leeuwen, I. F., Bouwens, R. J., van der Werf, P. P., Hodge, J. A., Schouws, S., Stefanon, M., Algera, H. S. B., Aravena, M., Boogaard, L. A., Bowler, R. A . A., da Cunha, E., Dayal, P., Decarli, R., Gonzalez, V., Inami, H., de Looze, I., Sommovigo, L., Venemans, B. P., Walter, F., Barrufet, L., Ferrara, A., Graziani, L., Hygate, A. P. S., Oesch, P., Palla, M., Rowland, L., and Schneider, R.
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies - Abstract
We present a new method to determine the star formation rate (SFR) density of the Universe at $z \gtrsim 5$ that includes the contribution of dust-obscured star formation. For this purpose, we use a [CII] (158 $\mu$m) selected sample of galaxies serendipitously identified in the fields of known $z\gtrsim 4.5$ objects to characterize the fraction of obscured SFR. The advantage of a [CII] selection is that our sample is SFR-selected, in contrast to a UV-selection that would be biased towards unobscured star formation. We obtain a sample of 23 [CII] emitters near star-forming (SF) galaxies and QSOs -- three of which we identify for the first time -- using previous literature and archival ALMA data. 18 of these serendipitously identified galaxies have sufficiently deep rest-UV data and are used to characterize the obscured fraction of the star formation in galaxies with SFRs $\gtrsim 30\ \text{M}_{\odot} \ \text{yr}^{-1}$. We find that [CII] emitters identified around SF galaxies have $\approx$63\% of their SFR obscured, while [CII] emitters around QSOs have $\approx$93\% of their SFR obscured. By forward modeling existing wide-area UV luminosity function (LF) determinations, we derive the intrinsic UV LF using our characterization of the obscured SFR. Integrating the intrinsic LF to $M_{UV}$ = $-$20 we find that the obscured SFRD contributes to $>3\%$ and $>10\%$ of the total SFRD at $z \sim 5$ and $z \sim 6$ based on our sample of companions galaxies near SFGs and QSOs, respectively. Our results suggest that dust obscuration is not negligible at $z\gtrsim 5$, further underlining the importance of far-IR observations of the $z\gtrsim 5$ Universe., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 24 pages, 14 figures, 8 tables (including appendices)
- Published
- 2024