BLAST Observations of the South Ecliptic Pole Field: Number Counts and Source Catalogs

Abstract

We present results from a survey carried out by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) on a 9 deg^2 field near the South Ecliptic Pole at 250, 350, and 500 μm. The median 1σ depths of the maps are 36.0, 26.4, and 18.4 mJy, respectively. We apply a statistical method to estimate submillimeter galaxy number counts and find that they are in agreement with other measurements made with the same instrument and with the more recent results from Herschel/SPIRE. Thanks to the large field observed, the new measurements give additional constraints on the bright end of the counts. We identify 132, 89, and 61 sources with S/N ≥4 at 250, 350, 500 μm, respectively and provide a multi-wavelength combined catalog of 232 sources with a significance ≥4σ in at least one BLAST band. The new BLAST maps and catalogs are available publicly at http://blastexperiment.info.

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