SXDF-ALMA 2-arcmin^2 Deep Survey: Stacking of Rest-Frame Near-Infrared Selected Objects

TL;DR

This study uses deep ALMA imaging and stacking techniques on near-infrared selected galaxies to investigate their millimeter emission, revealing correlations with stellar mass and implications for obscured star formation in the universe.

Contribution

It presents the first stacking analysis of 1.1 mm emission for near-infrared selected galaxies, linking stellar mass, redshift, and dust-obscured star formation.

Findings

Detected average 1.1 mm flux of 0.03-0.05 mJy for z=2 galaxies.

Found correlation between near-infrared brightness and millimeter emission.

Estimated that about half of cosmic star formation is obscured by dust.

Abstract

We present stacking analyses on our ALMA deep 1.1 mm imaging in the SXDF using 1.6 {\mu}m and 3.6 {\mu}m selected galaxies in the CANDELS WFC3 catalog. We detect a stacked flux of ~0.03-0.05 mJy, corresponding to LIR < 10^11 Lsun and a star formation rate (SFR) of ~ 15 Msun/yr at z = 2. We find that galaxies brighter in the rest-frame near-infrared tend to be also brighter at 1.1 mm, and galaxies fainter than m[3.6um] = 23 do not produce detectable 1.1 mm emission. This suggests a correlation between stellar mass and SFR, but outliers to this correlation are also observed, suggesting strongly boosted star formation or extremely large extinction. We also find tendencies that redder galaxies and galaxies at higher redshifts are brighter at 1.1 mm. Our field contains z ~ 2.5 H-alpha emitters and a bright single-dish source. However, we do not find evidence of bias in our results caused by the bright source. By combining the fluxes of sources detected by ALMA and fluxes of faint sources detected with stacking, we recover a 1.1 mm surface brightness of up to 20.3 +/- 1.2 Jy/deg, comparable to the extragalactic background light measured by COBE. Based on the fractions of optically faint sources in our and previous ALMA studies and the COBE measurements, we find that approximately half of the cosmic star formation may be obscured by dust and missed by deep optical surveys, Much deeper and wider ALMA imaging is therefore needed to better constrain the obscured cosmic star formation history.