DUSTY-PHOTZ: Dusty Starbursts, Photometric Redshifts, and Star Formation in the Distant Universe

Many cosmologically-distant galaxies are too faint for the acquisition of spectra. For these, a powerful, though somewhat indirect, method for distance estimates relies on photometric redshifts, in which multiband photometry is compared with templates covering ranges of age and metallicity found in the local universe. However, in the case of IR-Iuminous galaxies, ultra-luminous IR galaxies (ULIRGs), and sub-millimeter galaxies (SMGs), in which most of the star-formation acti"ity occurs at high redshift, these methods can be futile because the UV/optical features are highly obscured by dust. To date, no publicly available facility provides a photometric redshift estimator incorporating IR spectral energy distributions (SEDs). We propose to fill this gap through a two--pronged approach: (a) creation of a vast library of UV+opticaI+IR SEDs applicable to data for starbursts in the local universe and at high redshift; (b) development of an efficient method to derive the best-fit model SED at redshift zero, and derive the best-fit SED model together with an estimate of a photometric redshift for objects at cosmological distances.