A Panchromatic Overview of Starburst Galaxy Evolution

James D. Lowenthal, Department of Astronomy, Smith College, Northampton, MA

Starburst galaxies are observed as they experience a burst of star formation so powerful that it will quickly consume the available gas, and may form the majority of the galaxy’s stars. At all redshifts yet sampled, starbursts play a significant role in the global evolution of galaxies ; (part of) every galaxy has almost certainly gone through at least one starburst stage, while local merger-induced starbursts demonstrate that the phenomenon continues to be significant at the current epoch.
I will discuss recent research on 4 kinds of starburst galaxies :

Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at z≈3, in particular their masses ;
luminous compact blue galaxies (LCBGs), which account for up to 40% of the optically observed evolution from z=1 to z=0, and which are excellent local analogs of LBGs ;
ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs), mostly dusty mergers of gaseous disk galaxies, observed from z=0 out to z>1, including with HST ;
submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) — the distant analogs of ULIRGs — observed with the AzTEC 1mm camera.

Together, these observations account for the formation of most of the stars seen in galaxies today, and provide important clues to the complex processes by which galaxies continue to evolve.

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1002.0016

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0907.4380