A Monte Carlo approach to evolution of the far-infrared luminosity function with BLAST
Abstract
We constrain the evolution of the rest-frame far-infrared (FIR) luminosity function out to high redshift, by combining several pieces of complementary information provided by the deep Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope surveys at 250, 350 and 500 μm, as well as other FIR and millimetre data. Unlike most other phenomenological models, we characterize the uncertainties in our fitted parameters using Monte Carlo Markov Chains. We use a bivariate local luminosity function that depends only on FIR luminosity and 60-to-100 μm colour, along with a single library of galaxy spectral energy distributions indexed by colour, and apply simple luminosity and density evolution. We use the surface density of sources, Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) measurements and redshift distributions of bright sources, for which identifications have been made, to constrain this model. The precise evolution of the FIR luminosity function across this crucial range has eluded studies at longer wavelengths (e.g. using SCUBA and MAMBO) and at shorter wavelengths (e.g. with Spitzer), and should provide a key piece of information required for the study of galaxy evolution. Our adoption of Monte Carlo methods enables us not only to find the best-fitting evolution model, but also to explore correlations between the fitted parameters. Our model-fitting approach allows us to focus on sources of tension coming from the combination of data sets. We specifically find that our choice of parametrization has difficulty fitting the combination of CIB measurements and redshift distribution of sources near 1 mm. Existing and future data sets will be able to dramatically improve the fits, as well as break strong degeneracies among the models. Two particular examples that we find to be crucial are: obtaining robust information on redshift distributions and placing tighter constraints on the range of spectral shapes for low-luminosity (L_(FIR) < 10^(10) L_⊙) sources.
Additional Information
© 2011 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS. Accepted 2011 June 28. Received 2011 June 2; in original form 2010 October 5. Article first published online: 8 Aug 2011. We acknowledge the support of NASA through grant numbers NAG5-12785, NAG5-13301, and NNGO-6GI11G, the NSF Office of Polar Programs, the Canadian Space Agency, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). We thank the authors of CosmoMC for providing an easy-to-use MCMC generic sampler. Thanks also to Matthieu B´ethermin for useful discussions.Attached Files
Published - Marsden2011p16659Mon_Not_R_Astron_Soc.pdf
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:1ba75bef566bdfd30b9910a1773b8771
|
5.4 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 28662
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20120105-082036355
- NAG5-12785
- NASA
- NAG5-13301
- NASA
- NNGO-6GI11G
- NASA
- NSF Office of Polar Programs
- Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (UK)
- Created
-
2012-01-05Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field