EventsPast talk
Santa Barbara Astro Lunch
Yi-Kuan Chiang
ASIAA
Cosmic Infrared Background Tomography and a Census of Cosmic Dust and Star Formation
- When
- Wednesday 26 Feb 2025
12:00–1:00 pm PST - Where
- Broida 3302
- Series
- A weekly informal gathering of UCSB, LCO and KITP astrophysicists to hear about current research by locals and visitors.
From the calendar
The cosmic infrared background (CIB) traces the aggregate dust emission from all galaxies, providing a powerful probe for precision astrophysics and cosmology. We measure its evolving spectrum by cross-correlating diffuse far-infrared photons from Planck, Herschel, and IRAS with SDSS/BOSS/eBOSS galaxies up to z=4. This tomographic CIB spectrum reveals a broad, mildly evolving dust temperature distribution. We constrain cosmic dust density, Omega_dust, finding it peaks at z~1.5 and declines at late times, suggesting significant dust destruction. We measure total infrared luminosity density to sub-10% precision, uncovering a highly dust-obscured census of cosmic star formation over 0 < z < 4. For the first time, we also detect cosmic CO and CII backgrounds without line confusion. This work highlights large-scale data fusion in survey astronomy, integrating 10^8 intensity voxels across a 50-fold frequency range and 3 × 10^6 reference redshifts via 10^6 cross-correlations.