Automated Mining of the ALMA Archive in the COSMOS Field (A³COSMOS). I. Robust ALMA Continuum Photometry Catalogs and Stellar Mass and Star Formation Properties for ∼700 Galaxies at z = 0.5–6

Abstract

The rich information on (sub-)millimeter dust continuum emission from distant galaxies in the public Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) archive is contained in thousands of inhomogeneous observations from individual PI-led programs. To increase the usability of these data for studies deepening our understanding of galaxy evolution, we have developed automated mining pipelines for the ALMA archive in the COSMOS field (A3COSMOS) which efficiently exploit the available information for large numbers of galaxies across cosmic time, and keep the data products in sync with the increasing public ALMA archive: (a) a dedicated ALMA continuum imaging pipeline; (b) two complementary photometry pipelines for both blind source extraction and prior source fitting; (c) a counterpart association pipeline utilizing the multi-wavelength data available (including quality assessment based on machine-learning techniques); (d) an assessment of potential (sub-)mm line contribution to the measured ALMA continuum; and (e) extensive simulations to provide statistical corrections to biases and uncertainties in the ALMA continuum measurements. Application of these tools yields photometry catalogs with ∼ 1000 (sub-)mm detections (spurious fraction ∼ 8 − 12%) from over 1500 individual ALMA continuum images. Combined with ancillary photometric and redshift catalogs and the above quality assessments, we provide robust information on redshift, stellar mass and star formation rate for ∼700 galaxies at redshifts 0.5-6 in the COSMOS field (with undetermined selection function). The ALMA photometric measurements and galaxy properties are released publicly within our blind-extraction, prior-fitting and galaxy property catalogs, plus the images. These products will be updated on a regular basis in the future. A 3 COSMOS ALMA Continuum Images (Sect. 2.1) Multi-wavelength Catalogs (Sect. 2.3) Monte Carlo Simulations (Sect. 3) combine COSMOS master catalog (Sect. 2.3) Blind source extraction (PyBDSF; Sect. 2.2) Prior source fitting (get-pix+galfit; Sect. 2.4) Meta data Prior extraction catalog Blind extraction catalog apply sim. corr. apply sim. corr.

A3COSMOS: the dust attenuation of star-forming galaxies at z = 2.5–4.0 from the COSMOS-ALMA archive

“…We have analysed the IRX-β/M * dust attenuation relations of star forming galaxies at z ∼ 2.5 − 4.0 using all the publicly available ALMA archival data in the COSMOS field. In particular, we include all primary targeted galaxies as well as serendipitously covered sources within the primary beam width of existing ALMA continuum images that were processed by the A 3 COSMOS project team (Liu et al 2019). The ALMA data were cross-matched with the COS-MOS2015 optical-NIR photometric catalogue (Laigle et al 2016).…”

The ALPINE-ALMA [CII] survey

“…The previously derived IRX-M relations up to z ∼ 4 are mostly consistent with each other, and thus several studies agree on the nonevolution of the IRX-M relation over a wide redshift range. However, in a recent study, Fudamoto et al (2020) found a significantly steeper IRX-M relation using an unbiased sample of star forming galaxies at z ∼ 3 by exploring the entire public ALMA archive data in COSMOS (A 3 COSMOS, Liu et al 2019). The steeper slope in Fudamoto et al (2020) could reflect a difference in the FIR SED used in previous studies and/or a potential measurement bias in previous stacking analyses, which relied on low-resolution data (e.g., Herschel), however the exact reason is not yet clear.…”

FR-type radio sources at 3 GHz VLA-COSMOS: Relation to physical properties and large-scale environment

“…This is related to the ability of recovering low surface brightness emission. Extensive simulations on this aspect have been reported in Liu et al (2019), who presented a generic simulation. This is non-trivial to assess.…”