12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Host: Hayden Lee
Patrick Breysse (NYU) "First results from the CO Mapping Array Project"
Observations of high-redshift star-forming galaxies are fundamentally limited by the expense of detecting individual objects at great distances. New surveys using line intensity mapping (LIM) techniques are opening windows into previously undetected populations of faint galaxies at cosmic noon and beyond. I will discuss early science results from one such survey, the CO Mapping Array Project (COMAP), which is surveying unresolved emission in the CO(1-0) line at redshift 2.4-3.4. With ~450 hours of data on ~12 sq. deg. of sky, we place the best-existing limit on the clustering of CO emission, ruling out several literature models. We derive a limit of the total abundance of star-forming molecular gas in the universe consistent with previous measurements. Based on the performance of the instrument, we expect a strong detection of the CO power spectrum by the end of our five-year pathfinder campaign. I will also briefly discuss in this talk other in-progress work on the COMAP data, including stacking and one-point analyses. I will close by introducing the COMAP-EoR survey, which will commence following the pathfinder and which will extend our CO observations to the Epoch of Reionization.
