Serendipitous ALMA detection of a distant CO-emitting galaxy with a buried active galactic nucleus beyond the nearby merging galaxies VV114

TL;DR

This paper reports the serendipitous detection of a distant, CO-emitting galaxy with an obscured active nucleus behind nearby merging galaxies using ALMA, highlighting ALMA's sensitivity for such discoveries.

Contribution

First detection of a distant CO-emitting galaxy with an obscured AGN via chance ALMA observation, demonstrating ALMA's capability for serendipitous galaxy discovery.

Findings

Detected a galaxy at z ≈ 2.47 with a luminous obscured AGN.

ALMA's sensitivity allows chance detection of CO-emitting galaxies at high redshift.

Chance of such detection per ALMA field is approximately 10^-3.

Abstract

We report the detection of a distant star-forming galaxy, ALMA J010748.3-173028, which is identified by a 13-sigma emission line at 99.75 GHz (SdV = 3.1 Jy km/s), behind the nearby merging galaxies VV114 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Band 3. We also find an 880-um counterpart with ALMA Band 7 (S_880um = 11.2 mJy). A careful comparison of the intensities of the line and the continuum suggests that the line is a redshifted 12CO transition. A photometric redshift analysis using the infrared to radio data favors a CO redshift of z = 2.467, although z = 3.622 is acceptable. We also find a hard X-ray counterpart, suggesting the presence of a luminous (L_X ~ 10^44 erg/s) active galactic nucleus obscured by a large hydrogen column (N_H ~ 2 x 10^23 cm^-2 if z = 2.47). A cosmological simulation shows that the chance detection rate of a CO-emitting galaxy at z > 1 with \ge 1 Jy km/s is ~ 10^-3 per single ALMA field of view and 7.5-GHz bandwidth at 99.75 GHz. This demonstrates that ALMA has sufficient sensitivity to find an emission-line galaxy such as ALMA J010748.3-173028 even by chance, although the likelihood of stumbling across such a source is not high.