Submillimeter Galaxy studies in the next decade: EAO Submillimetre Futures White Paper Series, 2019

TL;DR

This white paper reviews past submillimeter galaxy studies and discusses future prospects with new instruments, emphasizing larger sky coverage and deeper surveys to better understand galaxy formation in the early universe.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of upcoming submm instruments with increased mapping speed to significantly expand survey areas and improve understanding of high-redshift galaxy populations.

Findings

Current surveys limited by sky coverage and confusion noise.

Future instruments will enable larger, deeper surveys.

Expected to enhance knowledge of early universe galaxy formation.

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) and SCUBA-2 on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) achieved gread success in discovering the population of dusty starburst galaxies in the early universe. The SCUBA-2 surveys at 450 micron and 850 micron set important constraints on the obscured star formation over cosmic time, and in combination of deep optical and near-IR data, allows the study of protoclusters and structure formation. However, the current submillimeter (submm) surveys by JCMT are still limited by area of sky coverage (confusion limit mapping of only a few deg^2), which prevent a systematic study of large samples of the obscured galaxy population. In this white paper, we review the studies of the submm galaxies with current submillimeter/millimeter (submm/mm) observations, and discuss the important science with the new submm instruments in the next decade. In particular, with a 10 times faster mapping speed of the new camera, we will expect deep 850 micron surveys over 10 to 100 times larger sky area to i) largely increase the sample size of submm detections toward the highest redshift, ii) improve our knowledge of galaxy and structure formation in the early universe.