Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 2005. 43:
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Abstract.
The discovery of the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) in 1996,
together with recent cosmological surveys from the mid-infrared to the
millimeter have revolutionized our view of star formation at high
redshifts. It has become clear, in the last decade, that a population
of galaxies that radiate most of their power in the far-infrared (the
so-called "infrared galaxies") contributes an important part of the
whole galaxy build-up in the Universe. Since 1996, detailed (and often
painful) investigations of the high-redshift infrared galaxies have
resulted in the spectacular progress covered in this review. We
outline the nature of the sources of the CIB including their
star-formation rate, stellar and total mass, morphology, metallicity
and clustering properties. We discuss their contribution to the
stellar content of the Universe and their origin in the framework of
the hierarchical growth of structures. We finally discuss open
questions for a scenario of their evolution up to the present-day
galaxies.
Key Words: cosmology - evolution - luminosity function - starburst - star formation
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