Bibcode
Valtchanov, Ivan; Altieri, B.; Berta, S.; Chapin, E.; Coia, D.; Conversi, L.; Dannerbauer, H.; Domínguez-Sánchez, H.; Rawle, T. D.; Sánchez-Portal, M.; Santos, J. S.; Temporin, S.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 436, Issue 3, p.2505-2514
Advertised on:
12
2013
Citations
16
Refereed citations
14
Description
We report the serendipitous detection of a significant overdensity of
Herschel-Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver 250 μm sources in
the vicinity of MRC 1138-26. We use an adaptive kernel density estimate
to quantify the significance, including a comparison with other fields.
The overdensity has a size of ˜3.5-4 arcmin and stands out at
˜5σ with respect to the background estimate. No features
with similar significance were found in four Herschel-observed
extragalactic control fields: GOODS-North, Lockman, COSMOS and UDS. The
chance of having a similar overdensity in a field with the same number
but randomly distributed sources is less than 2 per cent. The clump is
also visible as a low-surface-brightness feature in the Planck 857 GHz
map. We detect 76 sources at 250 μm (with a signal-to-noise ratio
greater than 3), in a region of 4 arcmin radius (or 1.51 ± 0.17
arcmin-2); 43 of those (or 0.86 ± 0.13
arcmin-2) are above a flux density limit of 20 mJy. This is a
factor of 3.6 in excess over the average 0.24 ± 0.02
arcmin-2 in the four control fields, considering only the
sources above 20 mJy. We also find an excess in the number counts of
sources with 250 μm flux densities between 30 and 40 mJy, compared to
deep extragalactic blank-field number counts. Assuming a fixed dust
temperature (30 K) and emissivity (β = 1.5), a crude,
blackbody-derived redshift distribution, zBB, of the detected
sources is significantly different from the distributions in the control
fields and exhibits a significant peak at zBB ≈ 1.5,
although the actual peak redshift is highly degenerate with the
temperature. We tentatively suggest, based on zBB and the
similar S250/S350 colours of the sources within the peak, that a
significant fraction of the sources in the clump may be at a similar
redshift. Since the overdensity lies ˜ 7 arcmin south of the z =
2.16 Spiderweb protocluster MRC 1138-26, an intriguing possibility (that
is presently unverifiable given the data in hand) is that it lies within
the same large-scale structure.
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