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

合作研究：最后的第一：完成我们对射电宇宙的看法“AST-0098355一项为期十年的计划，利用世界上最强大的射电望远镜提供20厘米射电天空的微弱图像（FIRST），即将实现其目标，即绘制银河系外整个北方天空，其分辨率和灵敏度超过以前的调查50倍或更多。迄今为止，已经探测到超过75万个无线电发射器，从附近的活跃星到已知的最遥远的类星体。这些图像和源目录都可以在万维网上找到，迄今为止已经被300多名天文学家使用。FIRST团队正在利用这个庞大的新数据库进行一些重大项目。通过将射电目录与2 MASS巡天所记录的近红外源相匹配，他们发现了许多高度模糊的类星体--这些天体从遥远星系核心的一个微小区域发射出相当于整个银河系能量一千倍的能量，这个区域充满了灰尘，以至于没有任何光线可以逃脱。 另一个重要的项目是使用整套无线电图像来试图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，他们寻找的是遥远的射电星系形状的轻微扭曲，这种扭曲是由于它们的无线电波穿过中间空间的质量分布而引起的。除了在满月大小或更小的天空中进行实验外，这项研究还将在10到100倍的尺度上研究暗物质的团块，从而将局部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，这告诉我们最早的物质分布。

Collaborative Research: The Last of First: Completing Our View of the Radio Universe"AST-0098355A 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.