PHZ: Planck High-Redshift Source Candidates Catalog

2,151 high-redshift source candidates detected by the Planck mission in the cleanest 26% of the sky. The catalog, created by NASA using a component-separation method on Planck and IRAS data, identifies luminous cold sub-millimeter sources with flux density above 500 mJy at 545 GHz. First follow-up observations suggest the list contains two populations: a small fraction of strongly lensed galaxies and a majority of overdensities of dusty star-forming galaxies, potentially proto-clusters.

Use Cases

• Identifying proto-cluster candidates based on overdensities of dusty star-forming galaxies.
• Studying the properties of strongly gravitationally lensed galaxies at redshift 2 to 4.
• Analyzing the spectral energy distributions of cold sub-millimeter sources peaking between 353 and 857 GHz.
• Comparing high-redshift source populations with lower-redshift clusters from the Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich Catalog.
• Investigating the early stages of structure formation and star-forming phases at high redshift.

Strengths

• 2,151 candidate sources detected using a validated method on numerous simulations.
• Sources selected from the cleanest 26% of the sky, likely reducing contamination.
• Detection algorithm requires simultaneous positive detections across multiple frequency maps and a non-detection at 100 GHz, suggesting robust selection.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect observational bias inherent to the Planck mission's sky coverage and detection limits.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Component-separation procedure using a combination of Planck and IRAS data, applied to select luminous cold sub-millimeter sources.

Time Range

Based on the Planck mission observational period.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 19:07:47.758234; freshness should be verified.

Geography

All-sky coverage, with candidates from the cleanest 26% of the sky.