Illuminating the Dark Side of Cosmic Star Formation. II. A Second Date with RS-NIRdark Galaxies in COSMOS

Creators: Behiri, Meriem^{1, 2, 3}; Talia, Margherita^{2, 4}; Cimatti, Andrea^{2, 5}; Lapi, Andrea^{1, 3, 6, 7}; Massardi, Marcella^{1, 3, 8}; Enia, Andrea^{2, 4}; Vignali, Cristian^{2, 4}; Bethermin, Matthieu⁹; Faisst, Andreas¹⁰; Gentile, Fabrizio^{2, 4}; Giulietti, Marika^{1, 4}; Gruppioni, Carlotta⁴; Pozzi, Francesca^{2, 4}; Smolçić, Vernesa¹¹; Zamorani, Gianni⁴

1. International School for Advanced Studies
2. University of Bologna
3. Istituto di Radioastronomia di Bologna
4. Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio
5. Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory
6. INFN Sezione di Trieste
7. Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe
8. National Institute for Astrophysics
9. Aix-Marseille University
10. California Institute of Technology
11. University of Zagreb

Abstract

About 12 billion years ago, the Universe was first experiencing light again after the dark ages, and galaxies filled the environment with stars, metals, and dust. How efficient was this process? How fast did these primordial galaxies form stars and dust? We can answer these questions by tracing the star formation rate density (SFRD) back to its widely unknown high-redshift tail, traditionally observed in the near-infrared (NIR), optical, and UV bands. Thus, objects with a large amount of dust were missing. We aim to fill this knowledge gap by studying radio-selected NIR-dark (RS-NIRdark) sources, i.e., sources not having a counterpart at UV-to-NIR wavelengths. We widen the sample of Talia et al. from 197 to 272 objects in the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) field, including also photometrically contaminated sources, which were previously excluded. Another important step forward consists in the visual inspection of each source in the bands from u* to MIPS 24 μm. According to their "environment" in the different bands, we are able to highlight different cases of study and calibrate an appropriate photometric procedure for the objects affected by confusion issues. We estimate that the contribution of RS-NIRdark sources to the cosmic SFRD at 3 < z < 5 is ∼10%–25% of that based on UV-selected galaxies.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the use of Python (v.3.8) libraries in the analysis. This work is partly based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under ESO program ID 179.A-2005 and on data products produced by CALET and the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit on behalf of the UltraVISTA consortium. M.T., A.C., A.L., M.M., A.E., F.G., C.G., and F.P. acknowledge the support from grant PRIN MIUR 2017 20173ML3WW_001. M.B. acknowledges A. Battisti for adding the A3COSMOS filters to the SED fitting code MAGPHYS+photoz. M.B. acknowledges A. Traina and N. Borghi for all the concrete support given from the very beginning of this work and F. Gabrielli for useful inspiring discussions.

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