The Extended Mapping Obscuration to Reionization with ALMA (Ex-MORA) Survey: 5σ Source Catalog and Redshift Distribution

Year: 2026 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae2fda
One of the greatest challenges in galaxy evolution over the last decade has been constraining the prevalence of heavily dust-obscured galaxies in the early Universe. At z > 3, these galaxies are increasingly rare, and difficult to identify, as they are interspersed among the more numerous dust-obscured galaxy population at z = 1–3, making efforts to secure confident spectroscopic redshifts expensive, and sometimes unsuccessful. In this work, we present the Extended Mapping Obscuration to Reionization with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA; Ex-MORA) Survey—a 2 mm blank-field survey in the COSMOS-Web field, and the largest ever ALMA blank-field survey to date, covering 577 arcmin². Ex-MORA is an expansion of the MORA survey designed to identify primarily z > 3 dusty, star-forming galaxies while simultaneously filtering out the more numerous z < 3 population by leveraging the very negative K -correction at observed-frame 2 mm. We identify 37 significant (>5 σ ) sources, 33 of which are robust thermal dust emitters. We measure a median redshift of〈 z 〉= 3.8_(−1.52)^(+1.7), with two-thirds of the sample at z > 3, and just under half at z > 4, demonstrating the overall success of the 2 mm selection technique. The total integrated z > 3 volume density of Ex-MORA sources is ∼1–3 × 10⁻⁵ Mpc⁻³, consistent with other surveys of infrared luminous galaxies at similar epochs. We also find that techniques using rest-frame optical emission (or lack thereof) to identify z > 3 heavily dust-obscured galaxies miss at least half of Ex-MORA galaxies. This supports the idea that the dusty galaxy population is heterogeneous, and that synergies across observatories spanning multiple energy regimes are critical to understanding their formation and evolution at z > 3.