BLAST off

The non-ironic DVD cover:

The science:

Figure 9 of Pascale et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1206

The Balloon-borne Large-aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) released a slew of papers on astro-ph today. This instrument has surveyed 8.7 deg2 in GOODS and ECDFS at 250, 350, and 500 microns.  The authors also incorporate IRAC and MIPS data from SIMPLE and FIDEL, and select sources based on 24um flux. The additional wavelength coverage from BLAST allows the authors to better constrain L_IR as well as directly constrain the average dust temperatures of sources as a function of redshift. It turns out that the cosmic IR background can be almost (or entirely) resolved into individual sources, with most of the 70um background coming from z<1 galaxies and the 500um background coming from z>1.

The above plot shows the inferred star formation density evolution from this study (black circles), UV/optical measurements (triangles; dashed error bars have extinction corrections applied). About 70% of their 24um sources had reliable UV/NIR photometric redshifts, and the remaining 30% were estimated through IRAC SED fitting; the grey circles show the SFH with these "IRAC redshifts" excluded. The solid and dashed lines show a luminosity function model with (dashed) and without (solid) taking into account the 24um flux limit of 20 microJansky. As the BLAST measurements fall below the model at thehighest redshifts, the authors conclude that they're missing a population of faint 24um sources.