Candidate high-redshift protoclusters and lensed galaxies in the Planck list of high-z sources overlapping with Herschel-SPIRE imaging

ABSTRACT The Planck list of high-redshift source candidates (the PHz catalogue) contains 2151 peaks in the cosmic infrared background, unresolved by Planck’s 5 arcmin beam. Follow-up spectroscopic observations have revealed that some of these objects are $z\, {\approx }\, 2$ protoclusters and strong gravitational lenses but an unbiased survey has not yet been carried out. To this end, we have used archival Herschel-SPIRE observations to study a uniformly selected sample of 187 PHz sources. In contrast with follow-up studies that were biased towards bright, compact sources, we find that only one of our PHz sources is a bright gravitationally lensed galaxy (peak flux ${\gtrsim }\, 300$ mJy), indicating that such objects are rarer in the PHz catalogue than previously believed (