Eight papers published about the results from the nerve-wracking BLAST balloon experiment, also topic of a unique documentary

An experiment flying on a balloon at the edge of the atmosphere has yielded the deepest far-infrared view of the sky yet achieved, revealing previously unidentified, dust-obscured, star-forming galaxies in the early Universe.

Submillimetre surveys during the past decade had discovered a population of luminous, high-redshift, dusty starburst galaxies which in the redshift range from 1 to 4 go through a phase characterized by optically obscured star formation at rates several hundred times that in the local Universe. Half of the starlight from this highly energetic process is absorbed and thermally re-radiated by clouds of dust at temperatures near 30 K with spectral energy distributions peaking at 100 µm - which is redshifted to wavelengths between 200 and 500 µm.

The cumulative effect of these galaxies is to yield extragalactic optical and far-infrared backgrounds with approximately equal energy densities. Since the initial detection of the far-infrared background (FIRB), higher-resolution experiments have sought to decompose this integrated radiation into the contributions from individual galaxies. And now the results are in from an extragalactic survey at 250, 350 and 500 µm, performed by the Balloon BLAST over Antarctica. Combining its results at 500 µm with those at 24 µm, it is found that all of the FIRB comes from individual galaxies, with galaxies at z over 1.2 accounting for 70% of it. As expected, at the longest wavelengths the signal is dominated by ultraluminous galaxies at z > 1.

You can find Daniel Fischers Cosmic Mirror here.