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Sinclaire Manning

Publications and source records attributed to Sinclaire Manning.

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ALMA and JWST Identification of Faint Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies up to z~8

We exploit a new sample of around 400 bright dusty galaxies from the ALMA CHAMPS Large Program, together with the rich JWST multi-band data products in the COSMOS field, to explore and validate new selection methods for identifying dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs). Here, we present an effective empirical selection criterion based on a newly defined parameter: I_star = log(M_star) x log(SFR). Incorporating the F277W-F444W color as a second parameter further improves the purity of the selection. We then apply this method to the COSMOS2025 catalog to search for fainter dusty galaxy candidates below the ALMA CHAMPS detection limit and, through a stacking technique, identify a population of high-redshift (z=6-8) DSFGs with an average flux density of$S_1.2mm = 0.15uJy and a space density of ~6E-6 Mpc^-3. This faint population seems to have been missed by most of the previous submillimeter/millimeter surveys, and ground- and space-based UV-to-NIR surveys. Finally, we discuss the possibility of an evolutionary connection between the z > 10 UV-bright galaxies recently discovered by JWST, the faint dusty z=6-8 galaxies identified here, and the population of z=3-5 massive quiescent galaxies, potentially linked as progenitor-descendant populations based on their abundance, redshifts, and stellar masses.

astro-ph.GA

Probing cold gas in a massive, compact star-forming galaxy at z=6

Observations of low order CO transitions represent the most direct way to study galaxies' cold molecular gas, the fuel of star formation. Here we present the first detection of CO(2-1) in a galaxy lying on the main-sequence of star-forming galaxies at z>6. Our target, G09-83808 at z=6.03, has a short depletion time-scale of T_dep~50Myr and a relatively low gas fraction of M_gas/M_star=0.30 that contrasts with those measured for lower redshift main-sequence galaxies. We conclude that this galaxy is undergoing a starburst episode with a high star formation efficiency that might be the result of gas compression within its compact rotating disk. Its starburst-like nature is further supported by its high star formation rate surface density, thus favoring the use of the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation as a more precise diagnostic diagram for starbursts. Without further significant gas accretion, this galaxy would become a compact, massive quiescent galaxy at z~5.5. In addition, we find that the calibration for estimating ISM masses from dust continuum emission satisfactorily reproduces the gas mass derived from the CO(2-1) transition (within a factor of ~2). This is in line with previous studies claiming a small redshift evolution in the gas-to-dust ratio of massive, metal-rich galaxies. In the absence of gravitational amplification, this detection would have required of order ~1000h of observing time. The detection of cold molecular gas in unlensed star-forming galaxies at high redshifts is thus prohibitive with current facilities and requires a ten-fold improvement in sensitivity, such as that envisaged for the ngVLA.

astro-ph.GA