Disentangling the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes with PRIMA

¹ INAF, Istituto di Radioastronomia, Via Piero Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “G. Galilei”, Università di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy
³ INAF-Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio, Via Gobetti 93/3, 40129 Bologna, Italy
⁴ Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
⁵ Aix Marseille Univ., CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France
⁶ Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
⁷ IPAC, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
⁸ Ritter Astrophysical Research Center, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA
⁹ Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010, USA
¹⁰ Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Dr., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
¹¹ Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
¹² NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
¹³ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Dr, Pasadena, CA 91011, USA
¹⁴ California Institute of Technology, 1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
¹⁵ INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy

Received: 26 April 2024
Accepted: 31 May 2024

Abstract

The most active phases of star formation and black hole accretion are strongly affected by dust extinction, making far-infrared (FIR) observations the best way to disentangle and study the co-evolution of galaxies and super massive black holes. The plethora of fine-structure lines and emission features from dust and ionised and neutral atomic and warm molecular gas in the rest-frame mid-infrared (MIR) and FIR provide unmatched diagnostic opportunities to determine the properties of gas and dust, measure gas-phase metallicities, and map cold galactic outflows in even the most obscured galaxies. By combining multi-band photometric surveys with low- and high-resolution FIR spectroscopy, the PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA), a 1.8 m diameter, cryogenically cooled FIR observatory currently at the conception stage, will revolutionise the field of galaxy evolution by taking advantage of this IR toolkit to find and study dusty galaxies across galactic time. In this work, we make use of the phenomenological simulation SPRITZ and the Santa Cruz semi-analytical model to describe how a moderately deep multi-band PRIMA photometric survey can easily reach beyond previous IR missions to detect and study galaxies down to 10¹¹ L_⊙ beyond cosmic noon and at least up to z = 4, even in the absence of gravitational lensing. By decomposing the spectral energy distribution (SED) of these photometrically selected galaxies, we show that PRIMA can be used to accurately measure the relative AGN power, the mass fraction contributed by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and the total IR luminosity. At the same time, spectroscopic follow up with PRIMA will allow us to trace both the star formation and black hole accretion rates (SFRs and BHARs), the gas-phase metallicities, and the mass-outflow rates of cold gas in hundreds to thousands of individual galaxies to z = 2.