Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Publication Title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Abstract

We present the first results from the largest deep extragalactic mm-wavelength survey undertaken to date. These results are derived from maps covering over 0.7 deg , made at λ = 1.1 mm, using the AzTEC continuum camera mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. The maps were made in the two fields originally targeted at λ = 850 μm with the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) in the SCUBA Half-Degree Extragalactic Survey (SHADES) project, namely the Lockman Hole East (mapped to a depth of 0.9-1.3 mJy rms) and the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Field (mapped to a depth of 1.0-1.7 mJy rms). The wealth of existing and forthcoming deep multifrequency data in these two fields will allow the bright mm source population revealed by these new wide-area 1.1 mm images to be explored in detail in subsequent papers. Here, we present the maps themselves, a catalogue of 114 high-significance submillimetre galaxy detections, and a thorough statistical analysis leading to the most robust determination to date of the 1.1 mm source number counts. These new maps, covering an area nearly three times greater than the SCUBA SHADES maps, currently provide the largest sample of cosmological volumes of the high-redshift Universe in the mm or sub-mm. Through careful comparison, we find that both the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) North fields, also imaged with AzTEC, contain an excess of mm sources over the new 1.1 mm source-count baseline established here. In particular, our new AzTEC/SHADES results indicate that very luminous high-redshift dust enshrouded starbursts (S > 3 mJy) are 25-50 per cent less common than would have been inferred from these smaller surveys, thus highlighting the potential roles of cosmic variance and clustering in such measurements. We compare number count predictions from recent models of the evolving mm/sub-mm source population to these sub-mm bright galaxy surveys, which provide important constraints for the ongoing refinement of semi-analytic and hydrodynamical models of galaxy formation, and find that all available models overpredict the number of bright submillimetre galaxies found in this survey.

Keywords

Cosmology: miscellaneous, Galaxies: evolution, Submillimetre, Surveys

Volume

401

Issue

1

First Page

160

Last Page

176

DOI

10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15620.x

ISSN

00358711

Rights

© 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 RAS

Comments

Archived as published.

No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.