International audienceMassive present-day early-type (elliptical and lenticular) galaxies probably gained the bulk of their stellar mass and heavy elements through intense, dust-enshrouded starbursts--that is, increased rates of star formation--in the most massive dark-matter haloes at early epochs. However, it remains unknown how soon after the Big Bang massive starburst progenitors exist. The measured redshift (z) distribution of dusty, massive starbursts has long been suspected to be biased low in z owing to selection effects, as confirmed by recent findings of systems with redshifts as high as ~5 (refs 2-4). Here we report the identification of a massive starburst galaxy at z = 6.34 through a submillimetre colour-selection technique. We unambiguously determined the redshift from a suite of molecular and atomic fine-structure cooling lines. These measurements reveal a hundred billion solar masses of highly excited, chemically evolved interstellar medium in this galaxy, which constitutes at least 40 per cent of the baryonic mass. A 'maximum starburst' converts the gas into stars at a rate more than 2,000 times that of the Milky Way, a rate among the highest observed at any epoch. Despite the overall downturn in cosmic star formation towards the highest redshifts, it seems that environments mature enough to form the most massive, intense starbursts existed at least as early as 880 million years after the Big Ban

Gravitational lensing is a powerful astrophysical and cosmological probe and is particularly valuable at submillimeter wavelengths for the study of the statistical and individual properties of dusty star-forming galaxies. However, the identification of gravitational lenses is often time-intensive, involving the sifting of large volumes of imaging or spectroscopic data to find few candidates. We used early data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey to demonstrate that wide-area submillimeter surveys can simply and easily detect strong gravitational lensing events, with close to 100% efficiency.

We present Herschel SPIRE-FTS observations of Arp 220, a nearby ultraluminous infrared galaxy. The FTS provides continuous spectral coverage from 1 The SPIRE beam shapes are not gaussian; the effective beam solid angle can be found in the Herschel Observer's manual.

We use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Cycle 1 to determine spectroscopic redshifts of high-redshift dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) selected by their 1.4 mm continuum emission in the South Pole Telescope (SPT) survey. We present ALMA 3 mm spectral scans between 84-114 GHz for 15 galaxies and targeted ALMA 1 mm observations for an additional eight sources. Our observations yield 30 new line detections from CO, [C I], [N II], H 2 O and NH 3 . We further present APEX [C II] and CO mid-J observations for seven sources for which only a single line was detected in spectral-scan data from ALMA Cycle 0 or Cycle 1. We combine the new observations with previously published and new mm/submm line and photometric data of the SPT-selected DSFGs to study their redshift distribution. The combined data yield 39 spectroscopic redshifts from molecular lines, a success rate of >85%. Our sample represents the largest data set of its kind today and has the highest spectroscopic completeness among all redshift surveys of high-z DSFGs. The median of the redshift distribution is z=3.9 ± 0.4, and the highest-redshift source in our sample is at z=5.8. We discuss how the selection of our sources affects the redshift distribution, focusing on source brightness, selection wavelength, and strong gravitational lensing. We correct for the effect of gravitational lensing and find the redshift distribution for 1.4 mm-selected sources with a median redshift of z=3.1 ± 0.3. Comparing to redshift distributions selected at shorter wavelengths from the literature, we show that selection wavelength affects the shape of the redshift distribution.

We present a catalog of all CO (J = 4−3 through J = 13−12), [CI], and [NII] lines available from extragalactic spectra from the Herschel SPIRE Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) archive combined with observations of the low-J CO lines from the literature and from the Arizona Radio Observatory. This work examines the relationships between L FIR , L CO , and L CO /L CO,1−0 . We also present a new method for estimating probability distribution functions (PDFs) from marginal signal-to-noise ratio Herschel FTS spectra, which takes into account the instrumental "ringing" and the resulting highly correlated nature of the spectra. The slopes of log(L FIR ) vs. log(L CO ) are linear for all mid-to high-J CO lines and slightly sublinear if restricted to (U)LIRGs. The midto high-J CO luminosity relative to CO J = 1−0 increases with increasing L FIR , indicating higher excitement of the molecular gas, though these ratios do not exceed ∼ 180. For a given bin in L FIR , the luminosities relative to CO J = 1−0 remain relatively flat from J = 6−5 through J = 13−12, across three orders of magnitude of L FIR . A single component theoretical photon-dominated region (PDR) model cannot match these flat SLED shapes, though combinations of PDR models with mechanical heating added qualitatively match the shapes, indicating the need for further comprehensive modeling of the excitation processes of warm molecular gas in nearby galaxies.