2025/05/14 by Sinclaire M. Manning, Manning, Sinclaire M., Jed McKinney +51
Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.09703
openalex publication_date 2025/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The relative fraction of obscured galaxies at z>4 compared to lower redshifts remains highly uncertain as accurate bookkeeping of the dust-obscured component proves difficult. We address this shortcoming with SCUBADive, a compilation of the JWST counterparts of (sub-)millimeter galaxies in COSMOS-Web, in order to further analyze the distribution and properties of massive dust-obscured galaxies at early times. In this paper, we present a subset of SCUBADive, focusing on 60 ``dark'' galaxies that dropout at 1.5\micron. Motivated by JWST observations of AzTECC71, a far-infrared bright F150W-dropout with z\rm phot=5.7+0.8-0.7, we complete a systematic search of F150W-dropouts with SCUBA-2 and ALMA detections to find more candidate high redshift dusty galaxies. Within our subsample, 16 are most similar to AzTECC71 due to fainter F444W magnitudes (>24 mag) and lack of counterparts in COSMOS2020. Despite high star formation rates (⟨SFR⟩=450+920-320 \mdot yr-1) and large stellar masses (⟨log10(\mstar)⟩=11.2+0.5-0.6 \mdot) on average, these galaxies may not be particularly extreme for their presumed epochs according to offsets from the main sequence. We find that heavily obscured galaxies, which would be missed by pre-JWST optical imaging campaigns, comprise \gtrsim20% of galaxies across mass bins and potentially contribute up to 60% at the very high mass end (log10(\mstar/\mdot)>11.5) of the z>4 stellar mass function.