Near-Infrared Imaging of Ultraluminous IRAS Galaxies

Abstract

IRAS discovered a class of objects which emit most of their radiation at infrared wavelengths and which possess bolometric luminosities comparable to those of classical quasars. Due to their extreme power, and the fact that (1) they are nearly always in the late stages of a galactic merger, and (2) they have a space density in the local universe comparable to that of optically selected quasars (Soifer et al. 1986), it has been suggested that the ultraluminous infrared galaxies represent an early, dusty stage in the evolution of an interacting pair of gas rich spiral galaxies into an optically identifiable QSO (Sanders et al. 1988).

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