NEPSC2: The SCUBA-2 850um Survey in the North Ecliptic Pole The north ecliptic pole (NEP) field will be a vital hub for near-future space telescopes. JWST, Euclid, SPHEREx, eROSITA, and SPICA – all these future space telescopes are planning deep fields in the NEP, due to its unmatched visibility from their orbits. The NEP will thus be central to the future of galaxy and black-hole evolution studies. Deep complementary far-IR/submillimeter survey would be essential to fully utilize the unique data sets that will be obtained in near future, such as deep X-ray images by eROSITA and deep near-IR grism spectroscopy by Euclid.
To prepare for the upcoming flood of space telescope data, we are executing survey that would complete the existing SCUBA-2 850 micron map of the 4deg2 area around the NEP, to a depth of sigmarms = 1.7 mJy/beam. In addition to the central 0.6 deg2 around the NEP mapped by the predecessor survey S2CLS, the new NEP 850 micron survey started from 2017 enlarged the mapping area as well as exploring to the deeper sensitivity. As of December 2019, the 4deg2 completion is ~50% complete in terms of the observing time.
Once the survey is complete, we will be able to achieve the following key science goals:
- to characterize full SED from stellar, PAH emission and far-infrared dust emission for z < 1 dusty star-forming galaxies
- to investigate dust scaling relations at z > 1 as a function of metallicity
- to understand the co-evolution of AGN and galaxies by searching for rare obscured AGN and investigate their feedback to star formation. We expect huge (>1000) sample of submillimeter galaxies and a large field coverage that can be used in stacking analyses and large scale structure studies.
Coordinators: Hyunjin Shim (South Korea), Tomotsugu Goto (Taiwan), Stephen Serjeant (UK), Hideo Matsuhara (Japan), Haojing Yan (China), Douglas Scott (Canada)
– JCMT Project Code: M17BL007 & M20AL005