ALMA Census of Faint 1.2 mm Sources Down to ~0.02 mJy: Extragalactic Background Light and Dust-Poor High-z Galaxies

TL;DR

This study uses deep ALMA observations to analyze faint 1.2 mm sources, revealing their significant contribution to the extragalactic background light and identifying their likely nature as dust-poor high-redshift galaxies, with implications for galaxy evolution.

Contribution

First comprehensive ALMA-based census of faint 1.2 mm sources down to 0.02 mJy, linking them to high-z dust-poor galaxies and EBL contributions.

Findings

Faint sources account for ~104% of the EBL at 1.2 mm.

Sources with flux <0.02 mJy contribute negligibly to the EBL.

About half of the sources are dust-poor high-z galaxies similar to sBzKs and LBGs.

Abstract

We present statistics of 133 faint 1.2-mm continuum sources detected in about 120 deep ALMA pointing data that include all the archival deep data available by 2015 June. We derive number counts of 1.2 mm continuum sources down to 0.02 mJy partly with the assistance of gravitational lensing, and find that the total integrated 1.2 mm flux of the securely identified sources is 22.9^(+6.7)_(-5.6) Jy deg^(-2) that corresponds to 104^(+31)_(-25) % of the extragalactic background light (EBL) measured by COBE observations. These results suggest that the major 1.2 mm EBL contributors are sources with 0.02 mJy, and that very faint 1.2 mm sources with ~< 0.02 mJy contribute negligibly to the EBL with the possible flattening and/or truncation of number counts in this very faint flux regime. To understand the physical origin of our faint ALMA sources, we measure the galaxy bias bg by the counts-in-cells technique, and place a stringent upper limit of bg < 3.5 that is not similar to bg values of massive DRGs and SMGs but comparable to those of UV-bright sBzKs and LBGs. Moreover, in optical and near-infrared (NIR) deep fields, we identify optical-NIR counterparts for 59% of our faint ALMA sources, majority of which have luminosities, colors, and the IRX-beta relation same as sBzKs and LBGs. We thus conclude that about a half of our faint ALMA sources are dust-poor high-z galaxies as known as sBzKs and LBGs in optical studies, and that these faint ALMA sources are not miniature (U)LIRGs simply scaled down with the infrared brightness.