22
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      The faint radio sky: radio astronomy becomes mainstream

      Preprint

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Radio astronomy has changed. For years it studied relatively rare sources, which emit mostly non-thermal radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. radio quasars and radio galaxies. Now it is reaching such faint flux densities that it detects mainly star-forming galaxies and the more common radio-quiet active galactic nuclei. These sources make up the bulk of the extragalactic sky, which has been studied for decades in the infrared, optical, and X-ray bands. I follow the transformation of radio astronomy by reviewing the main components of the radio sky at the bright and faint ends, the issue of their proper classification, their number counts, luminosity functions, and evolution. The overall "big picture" astrophysical implications of these results, and their relevance for a number of hot topics in extragalactic astronomy, are also discussed. The future prospects of the faint radio sky are very bright, as we will soon be flooded with survey data. This review should be useful to all extragalactic astronomers, irrespective of their favourite electromagnetic band(s), and even stellar astronomers might find it somewhat gratifying.

          Related collections

          Most cited references172

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          VLA observations of objects in the Palomar Bright Quasar Survey

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Thermal infrared and nonthermal radio - Remarkable correlation in disks of galaxies

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              The Compact Steep‐Spectrum and Gigahertz Peaked‐Spectrum Radio Sources

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                2016-09-02
                Article
                1609.00499
                38af3cab-3b74-46d4-97ab-76af69691ec2

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Review, 36 pages, 12 figures
                astro-ph.GA astro-ph.CO astro-ph.HE

                Cosmology & Extragalactic astrophysics,Galaxy astrophysics,High energy astrophysical phenomena

                Comments

                Comment on this article