IAU00290
Presentation type requested: POSTER
A FORMULATION OF THE CONFUSION PROBLEMS FOR SOURCE COUNTS
Tsutomu T Takeuchi
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
The source confusion is a long-standing problem of the astronomical history. Now it becomes important in many fields of astronomy, including submillimeter cosmology and high-precision astrometric missions. Fundamental assumption of the formulation is that the sources are distributed homogeneously on the sky. However, this assumption is obviously not realistic in many applications, e.g., stars in the Galaxy, or galaxies in the Universe. Qualitatively, clustering increases the confusion effect to some extent, but it is not an easy task to formulate the effect of clustering in the confusion problem. Up to now, only the work of Barcons (1992) has attempted to tackle the riddle and given solutions to a few typical cases. By making extensive use of the methods developed in the field of particle and statistical physics, fluid dynamics of turbulence, and the large-scale structure analysis in cosmology, we show the general formula for the confusion problems with arbitrary distribution and correlation functions. With this formula, we can obtain the confusion noise level for the sources with some prescribed correlation structure. It is undoubtedly useful for any future project for mapping the Universe. We show the source confusion of infrared galaxies as a typical example.
Ishii Takako T
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