Thomas Greve

Title: The nature of the newly discovered population of extremely bright submillimeter galaxies

Abstract: In the last few years a hitherto unknown population of rare, but 
extremely bright submillimeter galaxies was discovered by the South Pole Telescope
in an extragalactic blank field survey that is orders of magnitude larger
in area than any previous survey. The nature of this source population is currently a mystery, 
but a likely scenario is that they are strongly lensed SMGs at z > 4, in which case they represent an uncharted,
but possibly key aspect of massive galaxy formation and evolution that could stretch all the
back to the epoch of reionization (z > 6). 
In this talk I will present 350 and 870micron observations - obtained with the SABOCA and LABOCA
cameras on the APEX telescope on Chajnantor in Chile - of eight of these SPT sources. Together with
photometric and spectroscopic redshifts we are able to constrain the basic properties, such as
IR luminosities, star formation rates and dust masses, of these galaxies. The assembly of such
massive galaxies at these early epochs, poses a challenge for current models of Cosmic structure formation