The Observation and Detection of Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies

Dear Colleagues, 

It is a pleasure to invite you to join us in the compilation of this Special Issue on “The Observation and Detection of Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies”.

Galaxies detected in the submillimeter regime are the main site for star formation in the early Universe (z>1, Blain 1996; Casey et al. 2014). It is well established that a substantial contribution at the peak of the cosmic star formation rate (SFR) density comes from these heavily dust-obscured objects, featuring a submillimeter flux density >1 mJy and extremely high SFRs, up to ∼10^3 Msun/yr (e.g., Dudzevičiūtė 2020; Simpson et al. 2020, Giulietti et al. 2023). For this reason, they are referred to as Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies (DSFG). Thanks to their huge dust content, these objects are heavily obscured in optical bands and extremely bright in far-IR (FIR)-submm bands, where the light of newborn stars, reprocessed by dust, is re-emitted. Moreover, DSFGs have been identified as the progenitors of massive quiescent early-type galaxies. Therefore, they constitute ideal laboratories for testing galaxy evolutionary models.

In this Special Issue, we aim to summarize the state-of-the-art characterization of DSFG populations that dominate the millimeter-to-FIR extragalactic sky at high redshift, by presenting observations of their components (i.e., dust, stars, gas, chemical enrichment, active nuclei) in different spectral bands. We will also address technical issues associated with blind detection, source extraction, cross-identification in multi-wavelength analysis, and spectral energy distribution (SED) reconstruction. The overall picture will be enclosed in the framework of galaxy evolutionary models, in order to attempt a physical description of the DSFG populations in their various stages of evolution.

Dr. Marcella Massardi
Dr. Matteo Bonato
Guest Editors

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