Collaborative Research: The Last of FIRST: Completing Our View of the Radio Universe

合作研究：最后的最后：完善我们对无线电宇宙的看法

• 批准号: 0098259
• 负责人: David Helfand
• 金额: $ 24万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-09-01 至 2005-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0098259&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Last; FIRST; Completing

A ten-year program to use the world's most powerful radio telescope to provideFaint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST) is nearing its goal of mapping theentire northern sky outside the Milky Way with a resolution and sensitivity that exceed previous surveys by a factor of fifty or more. Over three-quarters ofa million radio emitters have been detected to date, ranging from nearby activestars to the most distant quasars known. The images and source catalogs are allavailable on the World-Wide Web, and have been used to date by more thanthree hundred astronomers.The FIRST team is pursuing a number of major projects with this massive newdatabase. Matching the radio catalog to the near-infrared sources catalogedby the 2MASS survey, they have discovered a number of highly obscured quasars --objects emitting a thousand times the energy of the whole Milky Way from a tinyregion in a distant galaxy core that is so dust-ridden that no visiblelight escapes. Another major project is using the entire set of radio images to attempt todetermine the distribution of the mysterious dark matter in the Universe.Recognizing Einstein's dictum that mass bends light, they look for the slightdistortions in the shapes of distant radio galaxies caused by the passage oftheir radio waves through the mass distribution of the intervening space.While optical astronomers have been conducting such "weak lensing" experimentson patches of sky the size of the full moon and smaller, this research will study theclumpiness of the dark matter on scales ten to one hundred times larger,thus making a direct connection between the galaxy distribution in the local Universe and the fluctuations seen in the cosmic background radiation whichtells us the distribution of matter at the earliest times.

一项为期十年的计划，利用世界上最强大的射电望远镜提供二十厘米射电天空的微弱图像（FIRST），即将实现绘制银河系外整个北方天空的目标，其分辨率和灵敏度比之前的勘测高出五十倍或更多。迄今为止，已检测到超过四分之三的无线电发射器，从附近的活跃恒星到已知最遥远的类星体。这些图像和源目录均可在万维网上获取，迄今为止已被三百多名天文学家使用。FIRST 团队正在利用这个庞大的新数据库开展许多重大项目。将无线电目录与 2MASS 调查编目的近红外源进行匹配，他们发现了许多高度模糊的类星体，这些物体从遥远星系核心的一个微小区域发射出整个银河系能量的一千倍，该区域布满灰尘，以至于没有可见光逸出。 另一个主要项目是使用整套射电图像来尝试确定宇宙中神秘暗物质的分布。认识到爱因斯坦关于质量使光弯曲的格言，他们寻找遥远射电星系形状的轻微扭曲，这些扭曲是由于射电波穿过中间空间的质量分布而引起的。 这项研究将研究十到一百倍大小的暗物质的团块，从而将当地宇宙中的星系分布与宇宙背景辐射中看到的波动直接联系起来，从而告诉我们最早的物质分布。