Galaxies 09: Assembly, Gas Content and Star Formation History of Galaxies
Manuel Aravena
NRAO
The Environment of Submillimeter Galaxies
Submillimeter galaxies (SMBs) are luminous and massive systems undergoing
vigorous star formation activity. Their large masses, number density
and clustering properties indicate that they are related to the
formation of structures at high redshift, and possibly they may the
precursors of luminous local ellipticals. In this talk, I will present
a study of the environment of the SMGs detected with MAMBO in the
COSMOS field and with LABOCA in the ECDF-S. Using density maps of low-
and high-redshift BzK galaxies we investigate whether some of the
brightest SMGs are located in galaxy overdensities. A few SMGs in
these surveys appear to be linked to significant overdensities of
star-forming galaxies at $z>1$. Such overdensities are compact in
size, similar to what is found in QSO fields at similar redshifts. We
use accurate optical/IR photometric redshifts to give an estimate of
the actual redshift of these associations. Using the angular
cross-correlation function between SMGs and BzK galaxies at
high-redshift we find that there is a close relationship between both
populations in scales $<10^{\prime\prime}$. Such compact groups could trigger
the extreme star-forming activity seen in some SMGs and they represent
good targets for studies of star and structure formation in normal to
starburst galaxies in the crucial epoch of galaxy assembly.
Return to the Conference Program