HerMES: The contribution to the cosmic infrared background from galaxies selected by mass and redshift

Abstract

The cosmic infrared background (CIB), discovered in Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE; Puget et al. 1996; Fixsen et al. 1998), originates from thermal re-radiation of imagine cutting out hundreds of thumbnails from a map centered on the positions where galaxies are known to be, and averaging those thumbnails together until an image of the average galaxy emerges from the noise. These positional priors can come in many forms, e.g., they could be catalogs of UV, optical, IR, or radio sources. Note that the output is the average of that population in the stacked maps, i.e., there will likely be sources whose actual fluxes are higher or lower. Thus, the more homogeneous the sources comprising the input list, the more meaningful the stacked flux will be.