Australia Telescope National Facility

Current Status

20cm GOODS observations

Deep (rms ~ 14µJy) 20 cm (1.4 GHz) observations of a small region around the GOODS field in the CDFS have been published by Afonso et al 2006.

20cm CDFS observations

The first half of the 20cm (1.4 GHz) observations of the extended (~3.7 square degrees) SWIRE field around CDFS have been completed and have been published by Norris et al. 2006). They have a typical rms of 20-40µJy, have detected 784 radio components, corresponding to 726 discrete sources, and are producing plenty of new results. All the data have been placed in the public domain.

We plan to go deeper, but suspended observing for the deeper observations pending the resolution of a calibration problem which threatened to limit our rms (and will also be a problem for next-generation instruments such as SKA and ASKAP). We now understand the problem and its solution, and have re-started observing, with an expected end of observing in late 2010, and a target rms of 10 µJy.

20cm ELAIS-S1 observations

The first half of the 20cm (1.4 GHz) observations of the extended (~3 square degrees) SWIRE field around ELAIS-S1 have been completed and have been published by Middelberg et al. 2007. They have a typical rms of 20µJy, and have detected 1039 radio components, corresponding to 916 sources. As in the case of CDFS, we are now continuing the observations with a target rms of 10 µJy.

13cm observations

In order to measure spectral indices and polarisation of the sources detected at 20cm, we hve also observed all our fields at 13 cm (2.3 GHz).

The 13 cm observations are complete, and analysed, but have not yet been published. We expect to publish them in late 2010.

50cm (GMRT) observations

We observed a few of our sources at GMRT in February 2007 at 50cm (610MHz) , and all of ELAIS in 2008. Analysis of these data is underway.

Optical Spectroscopy

We have obtained spectroscopic redshifts and spectral (BPT) classifications for about 500 sources using AAOmega together with other published data, and plan further spectroscopy observations in the future.

VLBI

We have made VLBI observations of several of our sources, and we hope in the future to start an extensive wide-field VLBI program on all sources in our field.

HDF-S observations

In an earlier project, we made deep (rms ~ 10µJy) observations of the Hubble Deep Field South at 20, 13, 6,and 3 cm. Further information (including the data relase) is here.

Other

A number of other programs and analyses, including obtaining photometric redshifts and SEDS, are also continuing.