Sub-millimeter brightness of early star-forming galaxies

TL;DR

This study models the sub-millimeter brightness evolution of early star-forming galaxies, revealing how interstellar medium clumpiness and galaxy phase influence dust temperature and observability with ALMA.

Contribution

It introduces a three-dimensional radiative transfer model that links galaxy evolution, dust temperature, and sub-millimeter brightness, highlighting the impact of interstellar medium structure.

Findings

Dust temperature decreases from >35 K in LAE phase to near CMB temperature in LBG phase.

Sub-millimeter brightness is higher during the LAE phase despite increasing dust-to-gas ratio.

ALMA can detect such galaxies with short integration times at redshifts 2 to 6.

Abstract

Based on a three-dimensional model of an early star-forming galaxy, we explore the evolution of the sub-millimeter brightness. The model galaxy is employed from an ultra-high-resolution chemodynamic simulation of a primordial galaxy by Mori & Umemura, where the SFR is ~ 10 Msun/yr at t<0.3 Gyr and several Msun/yr at t>0.3 Gyr. The former phase well reproduces the observed properties of LAEs and the latter does LBGs. We solve the three-dimensional radiative transfer in the clumpy interstellar media in this model galaxy, taking the size distributions of dust grains into account, and calculate the dust temperature as a function of galactic evolutionary time. We find that the clumpiness of interstellar media plays an important role for the sub-millimeter brightness. In the LAE phase, dust grains are concentrated on clumpy star-forming regions that are distributed all over the galaxy, and the grains can effectively absorb UV radiation from stars. As a result, the dust is heated up to T>35 K. In the LBG phase, the continuous supernovae drive dust grains far away from star-forming regions. Then, the grains cannot absorb much radiation from stars, and becomes into a cold state close to the CMB temperature. Consequently, the dust temperature decreases with the evolutionary time, where the mass-weighted mean temperature is T=26 K at t=0.1 Gyr and T=21 K at t=1.0 Gyr. By this analysis, it turns out that the sub-millimeter brightness is higher in the LAE phase than that in the LBG phase, although the dust-to-gas ratio increases monotonically as a function of time. We derive the spectral energy distributions by placing the model galaxy at a given redshift. The peak flux at 850 micron is found to be S_850 ~ 0.2 - 0.9 mJy if the model galaxy is placed at 6>z>2. This means that ALMA can detect an early star-forming galaxy with SFR of ~ 10 Msun/yr by less than one hour integration with 16 antennas.