A Bridge from Optical to Infrared Galaxies: Explaining Local Properties, Predicting Galaxy Counts and the Cosmic Background Radiation

Abstract

We give an explanation for the origin of various properties observed in local infrared galaxies, and make predictions for galaxy counts and cosmic background radiation (CBR), by a new model extended from that for optical/near-infrared galaxies. Important new characteristics of this study are that (1) mass scale dependence of dust extinction is introduced based on the size-luminosity relation of optical galaxies, and that (2) the big grain dust temperature T_dust is calculated based on a physical consideration for energy balance, rather than using the empirical relation between T_dust and total infrared luminosity L_IR found in local galaxies, which has been employed in most of previous works. Consequently, the local properties of infrared galaxies, i.e., optical/infrared luminosity ratios, L_IR-T_dust correlation, and infrared luminosity function are outputs predicted by the model. Our model indeed reproduces these local properties reasonably well. We then found considerably different results for MIR-submm counts and CBR from most of previous works based on the empirical L_IR-T_dust relation; especially, it is shown that the dust temperature of starbursting primordial elliptical galaxies is expected to be very high (40-80K). This indicates that intense starbursts of forming elliptical galaxies should have occurred at z~2-3, in contrast to the previous results that significant starbursts beyond z~1 tend to overproduce the far-infrared (FIR) CBR detected by COBE/FIRAS. On the other hand, our model predicts that the mid-infrared (MIR) flux from warm/nonequilibrium dust is relatively weak in such galaxies making FIR CBR, and this effect reconciles the prima facie conflict between the upper limit on MIR CBR from TeV gamma-ray observations and the COBE detections of FIR CBR. (abridged)