Probing the processes driving distant and local star-formation in galaxies through dust and molecules

• Main Author: Zhou, Luwenjia
• Other Authors: Astrophysique Interprétation Modélisation (AIM (UMR_7158 / UMR_E_9005 / UM_112)), Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Paris-Saclay-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité), Université Paris-Saclay, Nanjing University (Chine), David Elbaz, Yong Shi
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2020
• Subjects: Galaxy evolution; Star formation; Interstellar medium; Alma; Herschel; Noema; Évolution des galaxies; Formation d’étoiles; Milieu interstellaire; [SDU.ASTR]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Astrophysics [astro-ph]; sami
• Online Access: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03187486; https://theses.hal.science/tel-03187486/document; https://theses.hal.science/tel-03187486/file/98526_ZHOU_2020_diffusion.pdf

Studies on galaxy evolution have been revolutionized during the last decade thanks to the state-of-the-art telescopes and instruments. Herschel Space Telescope, ALMA and NOEMA interferometers can observe the dust emission that traces star formation missed by optical to near-infrared telescopes. Their high sensitivity pushes further their detections to the most distant galaxies or the faintest local galaxies, of which the formation and evolution challenge current theories and models. And the integral field unit technique combines the spatial information with the properties extracted from spectra which allows a thorough study of galaxy kinematics. In this thesis, I focus on the large-scale (~kpc) star formation of galaxies. Taking advantage of the data from Herschel, ALMA, NOEMA, and the SAMI IFU survey, my thesis tries to put more constraints on the following questions: (1) How did the first galaxies form stars out of gas with little metal? (2) How did the massive galaxies in the early Universe rapidly build up their masses and finally stop forming stars? and (3) what is the role played by the environments they reside in? (4) How does star formation feedback affect the galaxy kinematics? A large portion of the work done in this thesis is based on the GOODS-ALMA survey, the largest cosmological survey with the large ALMA interferometer at 1.1 mm. I studied the six optically dark galaxies with redshifts greater than z =3 uncovered by this survey. We present evidence that four out of the six optically dark galaxies belong to the same overdensity of galaxies at z~3.5. One of them, AGS24, is the most massive galaxy without an active galactic nucleus at z >3 in the GOODS-ALMA field. It also falls in the very center of the galaxy surface density peak, suggesting that the surrounding overdensity is a proto-cluster in the process of virialization and that AGS24 is the candidate progenitor of the future brightest cluster galaxy. I also studied the molecular gas content in IZw18, one of the most metal poor galaxies in ...