Using ALMA to resolve the nature of the early star-forming large-scale structure G073

Galaxy clusters at large redshift are key targets for understanding the nature of the early Universe, yet locating them has proven to be very challenging. Recently, a large sample of over 2000 high-z candidate structures have been found using Planck’s all-sky submillimetre maps, and a subset of 234 have been followed up with Herschel-SPIRE, which showed that the emission can be attributed to large far-infrared overdensities. However, the individual galaxies giving rise to the emission seen by Planck and Herschel have not yet been resolved nor characterized, so we do not yet know whether these sources are the progenitors of present-day, massive galaxy clusters. In an attempt to address this, we targeted the eight brightest Herschel-SPIRE peaks in the centre of the Planck peak G073.4−57.5 using ALMA at 1.3 mm, and complemented these observations with multi-wavelength data from Spitzer-IRAC at 3.6 and 4.5 μm and from CFHT-WIRCam at 1.2 and 2.2 μm. We also utilize data on G073.4−57.5 at 850 μm from JCMT’s SCUBA-2 instrument. We detect a total of 18 millimetre galaxies brighter than 0.3mJy in 2.4arcmin2. In every case we are able to match these to their NIR counterparts, and while the most significant SCUBA-2 sources are not included in the ALMA pointings, we find an 8σ detection when stacking the ALMA source positions in the 850 μm data. We derive photometric redshifts, IR luminosities, star-formation rates, stellar masses, dust temperatures, and dust masses; the photometric redshifts are concentrated around z ≃ 1 and z ≃ 2 and the NIR colours show a “red” sequence, while the star-formation rates indicate that three of the galaxies are “starbursts”. Serendipitous CO line detections of two of the galaxies appear to match their photometric redshifts with z = 2.05. We find that the ALMA source density is 8–30 times higher than average background estimates, and thus also larger than seen in typical “proto- cluster” fields. The evidence seems to be indicating the existence of two distant galaxy clusters aligned along the line of sight; however, a more complete mapping of the Planck and Herschel field at high resolution, coupled with spectroscopic redshifts, will be necessary to confirm this.