2025/09/01 by Bisigello, Laura, Gruppioni, Carlotta, Rodighiero, Giulia +5
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.01305
Although the majority of star-forming galaxies show a tight correlation between stellar mass and dust extinction, recent James Webb Space Telescope observations have revealed a peculiar population of Highly Extincted Low-Mass (HELM) galaxies, which could revolutionise our understanding of dust production mechanisms. To fully understand the dust content of these galaxies, which are a minority of the overall galaxy population, far-infrared observations over large areas are pivotal. In this paper, we derive the expected PRIMAger, the far-IR (24-235μm) imaging camera proposed for the Probe far-IR Mission for Astrophysics, fluxes for a set of photometric candidates HELM galaxies. Taking into account a deep survey of 1000h over 1\rm deg2, we expect to detect around 3.1 × 104 HELM sources in at least one PRIMAger filter, 100 of which are at z=1-1.5. For 32% of this sample, there will be observations in at least four PRIMAger filters, covering at least the 90 to 240μm wavelength range, which will allow us to obtain a detailed fit of the dust emission and estimate the dust mass.