Infrared and submm
Herschel Space Observatory
The Herschel space observatory carried out surveys in the submm range and one such survey provides legacy data in 5 submm wavebands. This suvey tells us about the dust in galaxies and you can read about
UCLan involvement
in this
Herschel-ATLAS survey.
Dusty early-type galaxies
From the Herschel-ATLAS and GAMA surveys we studied a complete sample of elliptical and lenticular galaxies (collectively known as early-type galaxies, or ETGs) to find out how much dust they contain and whether it correlates with other properties of these galaxies.
We showed that these ETGs, mainly in field and group environments, are dustier than expcted, with up to a few times 10^7 solar masses of dust in some cases. See Agius et al. 2013.
Contrasting these results with what is known for ETGs is the dense, nearby Virgo cluster of galaxies showed the Herschel-ATLAS detected sample to be far dustier. See Agius et al. 2015.
ALMA submm array
In the Atacama dessert lies the ALMA interferometer array. It can provide spectral mapping of astronomical objects to high spatial resolutions and can cover a wide range of possible mm/submm wavelengths.
Molecular gas in dusty ETGs
From our ETGs sample we selected five of the dustiest cases to be observed with the ALMA array. We mapped the distributions of molecular gas through CO line emission and found a wide diversity of results. This included three galaxies with massive, extensive molecuar gas discs and two galaxies with very little molecular gas. This diversity of results shows a lack of scaling between the cool interstellar medium and the stellar mass in ETGs. See Sansom et al. 2019.
