Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Joint Astrophysics Seminar

Dusty Corners of the Universe

Douglas Scott

UBC

The sub-mm waveband has opened up for cosmology, and through this window we can hope to glimpse some answers to a number of related puzzles:

• What are the brightest sub-mm galaxies?
• What sorts of galaxies make up the Far-IR Background?
• When did the Universe form the bulk of its stars?
• How important is dust obscuration for obtaining a full star-formation census?

I will describe some results from observations using the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Our group has obtained counts of sources through cluster lenses, has targetted specific objects such as Lyman-break galaxies and sources discovered by ISO, and has made a carefully constructed `Super-map; of the Hubble Deep Field North region (a.k.a. GOODS-N). This field has the most SCUBA data of any part of the sky, as well as the deepest available data at almost all other wavebands. We therefore have the most complete census of the multiwavelength properties of this sample of about 40 sub-mm sources.