For deep imaging longward of 100 um, confusion noise sets the fundamental sensitivity limits achievable with Herschel, and these limits cannot be improved by integrating longer. To penetrate through this confusion limit and detect faint high-redshift galaxies, gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters offers a very powerful and yet cheap solution. For this reason, we are currently conducting a PACS/SPIRE imaging survey of virgul40 massive lensing clusters as one of the Herschel Key Programs, The Herschel Lensing Survey (PI: Egami, 292.3 hrs). Although this program is producing many exciting results as reported in our 5 Herschel special-issue papers, one thing is becoming clear: it is extremely difficult to find lensed galaxies that are bright enough (> 200 mJy in SPIRE bands) to perform spectroscopy with PACS/SPIRE. This disappointment, however, was quickly overcome by the serendipitous discovery of an exceptionally bright (virgul500 mJy@350 um) z=2.3 galaxy lensed by a massive cluster at z=0.325. This discovery suggests that if we survey a large enough cluster sample, we will find similarly bright lensed sources that make all kinds of exciting follow-up observations possible. Here, we propose to conduct such a survey by taking advantage of the Millennium Cluster Sample constructed from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey with many years of extensive follow-ups. More specifically, we will conduct a SPIRE snapshot survey of 279 X-ray-selected clusters. SPIRE.s great sensitivity and observing efficiency means that we can complete this program in only 27 hours while achieving a nearly confusion-limited sensitivity of 10 mJy (1 sigma). Such a depth will allow all kinds of secondary science projects as well. Although SPIRE wide-area surveys like H-ATLAS will also discover many bright lensed galaxies, these sources are... mostly lensed by galaxies and not clusters, which makes our approach an economic alternative to investigate a different type of lensed systems.
Publication
Instrument
SPIRE_SpirePhoto_small
Temporal Coverage
2010-12-18T12:13:38Z/2012-08-09T14:03:24Z
Version
SPG v14.1.0
Mission Description
Herschel was launched on 14 May 2009! It is the fourth 'cornerstone' mission in the ESA science programme. With a 3.5 m Cassegrain telescope it is the largest space telescope ever launched. It is performing photometry and spectroscopy in approximately the 55-671 µm range, bridging the gap between earlier infrared space missions and groundbased facilities.
