Dusty Corners of the Universe
Monday  10 May, 2:30 pm, Curia II
Douglas Scott (British Columbia, CA)
@: dscott AT astro.ubc.ca

The sub-millimetre part of the electromagnetic spectrum has been opening
as a new window on the high redshift Universe.  In particular the SCUBA
instrument has detected more than 300 sources in deep integrations of
"blank sky".  I will show how multiwavelength images in the region around
the Hubble Deep Field north allow us to confidently identify about half
of the SCUBA sources.  They are typically redshift 2.5 ultra-luminous
infra-red galaxies, which often show up in radio continuum, sometimes in
the X-ray, and occasonally as very red optical galaxies.  Circumstantial
evidence suggests that they represent a population of proto-ellipticals,
which were forming a large fraction of all the stars at those epochs.
The biggest unresolved question is: what are the currently unidentified
sub-mm sources?  Related questions include: what is the cosmic star
formation history?; and what sorts of galaxies make up the cosmic
far-infrared background.  I will indicate how such questions may be
answered with current and future surveys.