Radio and millimeter continuum surveys and their astrophysical implications

By G. Zotti, M. Massardi, Mattia Negrello, J. Wall. 2009

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We review the statistical properties of the main populations of radio sources, as emerging from radio and millimeter sky surveys. Recent determinations of local luminosity functions are presented and compared with earlier estimates still in widespread use. A number of unresolved issues are discussed. These include: the (possibly luminosity-dependent) decline of source space densities at high redshifts; the possible dichotomies between evolutionary properties of low- versus high-luminosity and of flat- versus steep-spectrum AGN-powered radio sources; and the nature of sources accounting for the upturn of source counts at sub-milli-Jansky (mJy) levels. It is shown that straightforward extrapolations of evolutionary models, accounting for both the far-IR counts and redshift distributions of star-forming galaxies, match the radio source counts at flux-density levels of tens of μJy remarkably well. We consider the statistical properties of rare but physically very interesting classes of sources, such as GHz Peak Spectrum and ADAF/ADIOS sources, and radio afterglows of γ-ray bursts. We also discuss the exploitation of large-area radio surveys to investigate large-scale structure through studies of clustering and the Integrated Sachs–Wolfe effect. Finally, we briefly describe the potential of the new and forthcoming generations of radio telescopes. A compendium of source counts at different frequencies is given in Supplementary Material.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3d15b29f6fdf510a64b88802168546aec66533d

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Citations in the corpus

The faint radio sky: radio astronomy becomes mainstream (2016, methodology): “The state of the art of this field until early 2009 is reviewed by Zotti et al. (2010).”
LOFAR 150-MHz observations of the Boötes field: catalogue and source counts (2016, methodology): “23, we have included the several source count determinations from 1.4 GHz scaled down to 150 MHz from the compilation of de Zotti et al. (2010) (including counts from Bridle et al. 1972; White et al. 1997; Ciliegi et al. 1999; Gruppioni et al. 1999; Richards 2000; Hopkins et al. 2003; Fomalont et…”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “The Poisson radio galaxy contribution is based on the De Zotti et al. (2010) model for sources below the 5 σ detection threshold in the SPT-SZ survey, and the observed counts (Vieira et al. 2010) above that flux.”
RESOLVING THE RADIO SOURCE BACKGROUND: DEEPER UNDERSTANDING THROUGH CONFUSION (2012, background): “A recent compilation of source counts from surveys at frequaencies 150 MHz to 15 GHz is presented by De Zotti et al. (2010); features and cosmic implications are discussed there in detail.”
EXTRAGALACTIC MILLIMETER-WAVE SOURCES IN SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY DATA: SOURCE COUNTS, CATALOG, AND STATISTICS FOR AN 87 SQUARE-DEGREE FIELD (2009, methodology): “This frequency-dependent core-to-lobe flux ratio is commonly seen in radio-loud AGNs (e.g., Kharb et al. 2008; De Zotti et al. 2010) and is predicted by certain unified AGN models (e.g., Jackson & Wall 1999).”