Dusty Star Forming Galaxies And Their Environments PDF Download

The creation of new stars from cold gas is one of the most fundamental astrophysical processes that can be observed in our own galaxy and in others. At a broad level, the modern phenomenological picture of how stars form is consistent with observations of systems ranging from nearby molecular clouds to the most distant galaxies. Many gaps and limitations in the details of such a picture, however, remain unfilled and unanswered. For example, questions remain about the interplay between star formation and chemical enrichment in blue, metal-poor galaxies and the impact of that relationship in cosmic reionization -- one of the final frontiers of observational extragalactic astrophysics. Meanwhile, on the other end of the electromagnetic and metallicity spectrum, there exists a population of high-redshift, far-infrared-bright, and heavily dust-obscured starbursting galaxies that represent a fleeting but possibly integral stage in the growth of massive galaxies and of dense, large-scale structures like (proto)clusters of galaxies. However, the mechanism(s) that trigger such starbursts, especially in dense environments, remains ambiguous. The research that comprises this dissertation aims to answer two questions that, while both relevant to astronomers' understanding of the birth and evolution of galaxies in the broadest sense, are largely disjoint from one another. These questions are: 1) What are the intermediate- to high-redshift analogs to the sources that reionized the universe at very early times?; and 2) As a function of redshift and/or environment, how common are massively star-forming, dust-obscured galaxies? Because these questions are so different from one another, this dissertation will be split into two major parts. In the first, I present a search in two legacy fields (the GOODS-North and the GOODS-South) for galaxies at high redshift that may be sources of ionizing ultraviolet photons. Such objects are expected to be analogs, in various ways, to the first generation of galaxies, and thus provide clues to the nature of very-high-redshift galaxies that will be discovered en masse by future ground- and space-based observatories. In the second part, I present the spectroscopic confirmation of an overdensity of dusty starbursting galaxies at $z \approx 3.14$, signposting a protocluster of galaxies near the peak of star formation activity in the universe. Compared to similar recent discoveries in the literature, this new protocluster is relatively late-forming and includes several of the most infrared-luminous starbursts currently known. This makes it an excellent laboratory for testing theories of starburst triggering and the subsequent buildup of stellar mass in dense environments. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I reiterate the key results of the research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 5.