The Host Galaxies of Luminous Reddened Quasars at z~2
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The work in this thesis concerns the host galaxies of a class of luminous, yet heavily-obscured, quasars at z$\sim$2 - a peak epoch of both star formation and black hole accretion. Here, we seek to characterise the star-forming properties of these obscured quasars to improve our understanding of galaxy-quasar coevolution.
A key issue facing host galaxy studies among populations of the most luminous quasars is being able to disentangle the galaxy emission from that of the quasar. With combined observations from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) and the UKIDSS Large Area Survey (ULAS), we exploit the quasar dust extinction in our sample to demonstrate that the quasar and galaxy emission can be separated via SED-fitting in these systems. By isolating the galaxy emission in this way, we estimate instantaneous SFRs for the galaxies in our sample, based on the restframe UV emission. In general, we find obscured quasars to reside in prodigiously star forming hosts with 25
Having isolated the galaxy emission via SED-fitting, we test our ability to model the restframe-UV emission of obscured z$\sim
At sub-mm wavelengths, thermal emission from cold dust peaks, meaning these wavelengths can be used to probe the dust heating by star formation, effectively giving a measure of the obscured star formation in the galaxy. Using targeted observations from SCUBA-2, we trace the 850
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Hewett, Paul