The SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey: 850um maps, catalogues and number counts

Understand

We present a catalogue of nearly 3,000 submillimetre sources detected at 850um over ~5 square degrees surveyed as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey (S2CLS).

• This is the largest survey of its kind at 850um, probing a meaningful cosmic volume at the peak of star formation activity and increasing the sample size of submillimetre galaxies selected at 850um by an order of magnitude.
• We describe the wide 850um survey component of S2CLS, which covers the key extragalactic survey fields: UKIDSS-UDS, COSMOS, Akari-NEP, Extended Groth Strip, Lockman Hole North, SSA22 and GOODS-North.
• The average 1-sigma depth of S2CLS is 1.2 mJy/beam, approaching the SCUBA-2 850um confusion limit, which we determine to be ~0.8 mJy/beam.