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

合作研究：第一的最后：完成我们的射电宇宙观“AST-0098355一个使用世界上最大的射电望远镜提供20厘米射电天空微弱图像的十年计划(第一个)正在接近其绘制银河系外整个北方天空的地图的目标，其分辨率和灵敏度比以前的调查高出50倍或更多。到目前为止，已经探测到超过75万个射电发射体，从附近的激活星到已知的最远的类星体。这些图像和来源星表可以在万维网上获得，到目前为止已经有300多名天文学家使用。第一个团队正在利用这个庞大的新数据库进行一些重大项目。将射电目录与2MASS调查编目的近红外源进行匹配，他们发现了一些高度模糊的类星体--从遥远星系核心的一个微小区域发出的能量是整个银河系的1000倍的物体，那里尘土飞扬，无法逃脱可见光。另一个重大项目是使用整套射电图像来尝试确定神秘暗物质在宇宙中的分布。他们认识到爱因斯坦的格言，即质量使光弯曲，他们寻找遥远的射电星系形状上的轻微扭曲，这是因为它们的无线电波通过中间空间的质量分布。尽管光学天文学家一直在满月大小或更小的天空区域进行这种“弱透镜”实验，但这项研究将研究暗物质在十到一百倍大小的尺度上的块状。因此，星系在局部宇宙中的分布与宇宙背景辐射中的涨落有直接联系，这让我们最早地了解了物质的分布。

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.