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Description
The use of submillimeter dust continuum emission to probe the mass of interstellar dust and gas in galaxies is empirically calibrated using samples of local star-forming galaxies, Planck observations of the Milky Way, and high-redshift submillimeter galaxies. All of these objects suggest a similar calibration, strongly supporting the view that the Rayleigh-Jeans tail of the dust emission can be used as an accurate and very fast probe of the interstellar medium (ISM) in galaxies. We present ALMA Cycle 0 observations of the Band 7 (350GHz) dust emission in 107 galaxies from z=0.2 to 2.5. Three samples of galaxies with a total of 101 galaxies were stellar-mass-selected from COSMOS to have M_*_=~10^11^M_{sun}_:37 at z~0.4, 33 at z~0.9, and 31 at z=2. A fourth sample with six infrared-luminous galaxies at z=2 was observed for comparison with the purely mass-selected samples. From the fluxes detected in the stacked images for each sample, we find that the ISM content has decreased by a factor ~6 from 1 to 2x10^10^M_{sun}_ at both z=2 and 0.9 down to ~2x10^9^M_{sun}_at z=0.4. The infrared-luminous sample at z=2 shows a further ~4 times increase in M_ISM_compared with the equivalent non-infrared-bright sample at the same redshift. The gas mass fractions are ~2%+/-0.5%, 12%+/-3%, 14%+/-2%, and 53%+/-3% for the four subsamples (z=0.4, 0.9, and 2 and infrared-bright galaxies).
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