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Published March 2010 | Published
Journal Article Open

The comoving infrared luminosity density: domination of cold galaxies across 0 < z < 1

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the contribution of galaxies with different infrared (IR) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to the comoving IR luminosity density (IRLD), a proxy for the comoving star formation rate (SFR) density. We characterize galaxies as having either a cold or hot IR SED depending on whether the rest-frame wavelength of their peak IR energy output is above or below 90 μ m. Our work is based on a far-IR selected sample both in the local Universe and at high redshift, the former consisting of IRAS 60 μ m-selected galaxies at z < 0.07 and the latter of Spitzer 70 μm selected galaxies across 0.1 < z ≤ 1 . We find that the total IR luminosity densities for each redshift/luminosity bin agree well with results derived from other deep mid-/far-IR surveys. At z < 0.07 , we observe the previously known results that moderate luminosity galaxies (L_(IR) < 10^(11) L_⊙) dominate the total luminosity density and that the fraction of cold galaxies decreases with increasing luminosity, becoming negligible at the highest luminosities. Conversely, above z= 0.1 , we find that luminous IR galaxies (L_(IR) > 10^(11) L_⊙) , the majority of which are cold, dominate the IRLD. We therefore infer that cold galaxies dominate the IRLD across the whole 0 < z < 1 range, hence appear to be the main driver behind the increase in SFR density up to z∼ 1 whereas local luminous galaxies are not, on the whole, representative of the high-redshift population.

Additional Information

© 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 RAS. Accepted 2009 November 20; received 2009 November 13; in original form 2009 August 7. We thank Andrew Hopkins for useful discussions. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work was partially supported by JPL/Caltech contract 1255094 to the University of Arizona.

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