Extragalactic Submillimetric Surveys with BLAST

¹ Department of Physics & Astronomy, Cardiff University, 5 The Parade, Cardiff, CF24 3AA, UK
² Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099, USA
³ Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada
⁴ Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 209 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
⁵ Department of Physics, University of Miami, 1320 Campo Sano Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA
⁶ Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Aptdo. Postal 51 y 72000 Puebla, Mexico
⁷ Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 50 St. George Street Toronto, ON M5S 3H4, Canada
⁸ Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H8, Canada
⁹ Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 1A7, Canada
¹⁰ University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, Physics Dept., Box 23343, UPR station, Puerto Rico
¹¹ IRA-INAF, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
¹² Laboratoire APC, 10 rue Alice Domon et Léonie Duquet, 75205 Paris, France
¹³ Department of Physics, Brown University, 182 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA

Abstract

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) has recently conducted an extragalactic submillimetric survey of the Chandra Deep Field South region of unprecedented size, depth, and angular resolution in three wavebands centered at 250, 350, and 500 µm. BLAST wavelengths are chosen to study the Cosmic Infrared Background near its peak at 200 µm. We find that most of the CIB at these wavelengths is contributed by galaxies detected at 24 µm by the MIPS instrument on Spitzer, and that the source counts distribution shows a population with strongly evolving density and luminosity. These results anticipate what can be expected from the surveys that will be conducted with the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel space observatory.