A Spectroscopic Survey of the Submillimeter Galaxy Population: 85 Redshifts Using Keck/LRIS-B

Abstract

We present spectroscopic identifications for a sample of 85 millimeter and submillimeter galaxies detected with the SCUBA/JCMT and MAMBO/IRAM30m facilities, all identified with deep 1.4GHz VLA radio observations. The galaxies lie at redshifts z=0.5 to 3.5, We describe their properties, especially the presence of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the sample, and discuss the connection of the mm/submm galaxies and the formation of spheroidal components of galaxies, which requires knowledge of the timescales of their very luminous activity. For a subset of the galaxies, we show their disturbed and diverse Hubble Space Telescope (HST) optical morphologies.