The nature of distant dust-enshrouded galaxies

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AST-0205937Blain, Andrew W.This program will develop new understanding of the nature of very-luminous dust-enshrouded high redshift galaxies recently discovered in the submillimeter waveband. These luminous distant 'SMGs ' generate a significant fraction of the energy emitted by all galaxies over the early history of the Universe, and yet are still poorly understood. This is largely because the angular resolution of even the most powerful submillimeter-wave survey telescopes is not sufficient to pin down the positions of SMGs with sufficient accuracy to confirm a single galaxy as their counterpart in an optical image. This program will determine accurate positions for the counterparts, and then determine their redshifts and astrophysical properties. Measuring the redshift distribution for the SMGs is a particularly important goal. This is the most important piece of information required to determine the evolution of the population of SMGs, and their relationship with the larger and better understood samples of high-redshift galaxies detected in optical galaxy surveys.***