The effect of dust on the emergent spectra of galaxies; theoretical and observational approaches

In this thesis we use state-of-the-art theoretical models to study the impact of dust on the emergent spectral energy distribution (SED) of galaxies. We propose new two-dimensional far-infrared templates based on radiative transfer simulations applied to hydro-dynamically modeled galaxies. We suggest having high gas fractions and therefore higher dust content is the reason behind the observed cold far-infrared temperatures of high redshift infrared luminous galaxies (LIRGs). We further show that high-redshift galaxies with strong infrared excesses need not be mergers; in our simulations isolated disk galaxies can populate this portion of parameter space. We show that current simplified approaches to model the dust attenuation in semi analytic frameworks does not capture the trends that are seen in the local LIRGs. We further propose a technique to overcome the confusion noise in crowded field images that can improve far-infrared photometry for high redshift galaxies