Constraining the Evolutionary Mass Function and Star-Formation Activity in Galaxies from the Spizer Wide-Area Infrared Extragalactic Survey (SWIRE)

Abstract

The Wide-area Infrared Extragalactic (SWIRE) survey is a Legacy Program of the Spizer Space Telescope (SST)exploiting 851 hours of observatory time to conduct a set of large-area (currently foreseen ~ 49 square degrees split into 6 high Galactic latitude fields) imaging surveys, achieving 5σ sensitivities of 4.3/6.5/33/36 μJy at 3.6/4.5/5.8/8.0 μm with IRAC and 0.19/15/40 mJy at 24/70/160 μm with MIPS. SWIRE will allow studying evolved galaxies (from IRAC data) and actively star-forming galaxies and quasars (from MIPS) over co-moving scales up to several hundreds Mpc and down to substantial cosmological depths (z≃ 2.5 for luminous sources). Thanks to the large total survey area, SWIRE will provide a complement to smaller and deeper observations in the Spitzer Guaranteed Time and the Legacy Program, by allowing direct comparison of local and high-z galaxy samples and the investigation of the effects of environment on galaxy evolution.

Keywords

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