Optical-Infrared Properties of Faint 1.3 mm Sources Detected with ALMA

TL;DR

This study investigates the optical-infrared properties of faint 1.3 mm sources detected with ALMA, revealing their nature as typical star-forming galaxies and potential early-stage galaxy mergers.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of faint ALMA-detected sources' optical/IR counterparts, showing they are more like normal star-forming galaxies than classical SMGs.

Findings

ALMA sources are brighter, more massive, and actively star-forming.

Most ALMA sources lie on the star-forming main sequence.

Possible early-stage galaxy merger identified at z ~ 1.3-1.6.

Abstract

We report optical-infrared (IR) properties of faint 1.3 mm sources (S_1.3mm = 0.2-1.0 mJy) detected with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey (SXDS) field. We searched for optical/IR counterparts of 8 ALMA-detected sources (>=4.0 sigma, the sum of the probability of spurious source contamination is ~1) in a K-band source catalog. Four ALMA sources have K-band counterpart candidates within a 0.4" radius. Comparison between ALMA-detected and undetected K-band sources in the same observing fields shows that ALMA-detected sources tend to be brighter, more massive, and more actively forming stars. While many of the ALMA-identified submillimeter-bright galaxies (SMGs) in previous studies lie above the sequence of star-forming galaxies in stellar mass--star-formation rate plane, our ALMA sources are located in the sequence, suggesting that the ALMA-detected faint sources are more like `normal' star-forming galaxies rather than `classical' SMGs. We found a region where multiple ALMA sources and K-band sources reside in a narrow photometric redshift range (z ~ 1.3-1.6) within a radius of 5" (42 kpc if we assume z = 1.45). This is possibly a pre-merging system and we may be witnessing the early phase of formation of a massive elliptical galaxy.