ALMA Census of Faint 1.2 mm Sources Down to ~0.02 mJy: Extragalactic Background Light and Dust-Poor High-z Galaxies

Understand

We present statistics of 133 faint 1.2-mm continuum sources detected in about 120 deep ALMA pointing data that include all the archival deep data available by 2015 June.

• We derive number counts of 1.2 mm continuum sources down to 0.02 mJy partly with the assistance of gravitational lensing, and find that the total integrated 1.2 mm flux of the securely identified sources is 22.9^(+6.7)_(-5.6) Jy deg^(-2) that corresponds to 104^(+31)_(-25) % of the extragalactic background light (EBL) measured by COBE observations.
• These results suggest that the major 1.2 mm EBL contributors are sources with 0.02 mJy, and that very faint 1.2 mm sources with ~< 0.02 mJy contribute negligibly to the EBL with the possible flattening and/or truncation of number counts in this very faint flux regime.
• To understand the physical origin of our faint ALMA sources, we measure the galaxy bias bg by the counts-in-cells technique, and place a stringent upper limit of bg < 3.5 that is not similar to bg values of massive DRGs and SMGs but comparable to those of UV-bright sBzKs and LBGs.