Tracing the Star Formation History of the Universe through Thermal Free-Free Emission with the SKA

Abstract

One of the major scientific aims of the SKA is to trace the history of star formation across cosmic time. High-frequency radio surveys are indispensable in this regard, as these are capable of probing thermal free-free emission (FFE) -- the dominant component of the radio continuum of star-forming galaxies above rest-frame frequencies of $\gtrsim25\,$GHz. FFE is a powerful, direct star-formation rate (SFR) indicator, which robustly traces the number of ionizing photons produced by recently formed massive stars in a nearly dust-unbiased manner. In this chapter, we forecast the ability of the SKA to detect FFE in typical star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. Our starting point is the state-of-the-art T-RECS simulation suite of the faint radio sky, to which we apply an ambitious, matched-depth, multi-band AA4 SKA-Mid survey in Bands 1 through 5b, covering an area of $0.25\,\mathrm{deg}^2$ across $0.35 - 15.4\,\mathrm{GHz}$. We predict that such a survey will detect $\sim1.5\times10^4$ star-forming galaxies in all bands out to $z\approx7$, and perform simulations using established fitting techniques to investigate the accuracy with which their thermal FFE can be recovered. We find that thermal fractions ($f_\mathrm{th}$) and synchrotron spectral indices can be constrained in an unbiased manner, and predict uncertainties on the thermal SFRs of $\lesssim 0.1\,\mathrm{dex}$ for galaxies at the knee of the radio luminosity function across redshift. Convolving the distribution of $f_\mathrm{th}$ inferred from the multi-band SKA-Mid survey with wider luminosity function determinations at low radio frequencies will yield robust constraints on the total cosmic star formation rate density out to $z\sim7$.