THE SXDF-ALMA 2 arcmin2 DEEP SURVEY: STACKING REST-FRAME NEAR-INFRARED SELECTED OBJECTS

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present stacking analyses on our ALMA deep 1.1 mm imaging in the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field using 1.6 and 3.6 μm selected galaxies in the CANDELS WFC3 catalog. We detect a stacked flux of ∼0.03–0.05 mJy, corresponding to and a star formation rate (SFR) of yr−1 at z = 2. We find that galaxies that are brighter in the rest-frame near-infrared tend to also be brighter at 1.1 mm, and galaxies fainter than do not produce detectable 1.1 mm emission. This suggests a correlation between stellar mass and SFR, but outliers to this correlation are also observed, suggesting strongly boosted star formation or extremely large extinction. We also find tendencies that redder galaxies and galaxies at higher redshifts are brighter at 1.1 mm. Our field contains Hα emitters and a bright single-dish source. However, we do not find evidence of bias in our results caused by the bright source. By combining the fluxes of sources detected by ALMA and fluxes of faint sources detected with stacking, we recover a 1.1 mm surface brightness of up to 20.3 ± 1.2 Jy deg−2, comparable to the extragalactic background light measured by COBE. Based on the fractions of optically faint sources in our and previous ALMA studies and the COBE measurements, we find that approximately half of the cosmic star formation may be obscured by dust and missed by deep optical surveys. Much deeper and wider ALMA imaging is therefore needed to better constrain the obscured cosmic star formation history.