Missing Giants: Predictions on Dust-Obscured Galaxy Stellar Mass Assembly Throughout Cosmic Time

Understand

Due to their extremely dust-obscured nature, much uncertainty still exists surrounding the stellar mass growth and content in dusty, star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) at $z>1$.

• In this work, we present a numerical model built using empirical data on DSFGs to estimate their stellar mass contributions across the first $\sim$10 Gyr of cosmic time.
• We generate a dust-obscured stellar mass function that extends beyond the mass limit of star-forming stellar mass functions in the literature, and predict that massive DSFGs constitute as much as $50-100\%$ of all star-forming galaxies with M $\ge10^{11}$M$_\odot$ at $z>1$.
• We predict the number density of massive DSFGs and find general agreement with observations, although more data is needed to narrow wide observational uncertainties.