Spinoglio, L.; Alonso-Herrero, A.; Armus, L.; Baes, M.; Bernard-Salas, J.; Bianchi, S.; Bocchio, M.; Bolatto, A.; Bradford, C.; Braine, J.; Carrera, F. J.; Ciesla, L.; Clements, D. L.; Dannerbauer, H.; Doi, Y.; Efstathiou, A.; Egami, E.; Fernández-Ontiveros, J. A.; Ferrara, A.; Fischer, J.; Franceschini, A.; Gallerani, S.; Giard, M.; González-Alfonso, E.; Gruppioni, C.; Guillard, P.; Hatziminaoglou, E.; Imanishi, M.; Ishihara, D.; Isobe, N.; Kaneda, H.; Kawada, M.; Kohno, K.; Kwon, J.; Madden, S.; Malkan, M. A.; Marassi, S.; Matsuhara, H.; Matsuura, M.; Miniutti, G.; Nagamine, K.; Nagao, T.; Najarro, F.; Nakagawa, T.; Onaka, T.; Oyabu, S.; Pallottini, A.; Piro, L.; Pozzi, F.; Rodighiero, G.; Roelfsema, P.; Sakon, I.; Santini, P.; Schaerer, D.; Schneider, R.; Scott, D.; Serjeant, S.; Shibai, H.; Smith, J.-D. T.; Sobacchi, E.; Sturm, E.; Suzuki, T.; Vallini, L.; van der Tak, F.; Vignali, C.; Yamada, T.; Wada, T.; Wang, L.
Bibliographical reference
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, Volume 34, id.e057 13 pp.
Description
IR spectroscopy in the range 12-230 μm with the SPace IR telescope
for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) will reveal the physical
processes governing the formation and evolution of galaxies and black
holes through cosmic time, bridging the gap between the James Webb Space
Telescope and the upcoming Extremely Large Telescopes at shorter
wavelengths and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array at longer
wavelengths. The SPICA, with its 2.5-m telescope actively cooled to
below 8 K, will obtain the first spectroscopic determination, in the
mid-IR rest-frame, of both the star-formation rate and black hole
accretion rate histories of galaxies, reaching lookback times of 12 Gyr,
for large statistically significant samples. Densities, temperatures,
radiation fields, and gas-phase metallicities will be measured in
dust-obscured galaxies and active galactic nuclei, sampling a large
range in mass and luminosity, from faint local dwarf galaxies to
luminous quasars in the distant Universe. Active galactic nuclei and
starburst feedback and feeding mechanisms in distant galaxies will be
uncovered through detailed measurements of molecular and atomic line
profiles. The SPICA's large-area deep spectrophotometric surveys will
provide mid-IR spectra and continuum fluxes for unbiased samples of tens
of thousands of galaxies, out to redshifts of z 6.
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