Millimeter-band Surveys of Extragalactic Sources.pdfVIP

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 2 0 4 0 3 8 v 1 2 A p r 2 0 0 2 SRT: the impact of large antennas on Radioastronomy and Space Science SRT Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1, 2002 Editors: TBD Millimeter-band Surveys of Extragalactic Sources Gianfranco De Zotti, Francesca Perrotta and Gian Luigi Granato INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Italy Laura Silva INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Italy Roberto Ricci, Carlo Baccigalupi and Luigi Danese SISSA, Trieste, Italy Luigi Toffolatti Departamento de F??sica, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain Abstract. Surveys at mm wavelengths emphasize rare classes of extra- galactic radio sources characterized by spectra keeping flat or inverted up to high frequencies (such as blazars, GPS sources, advection dominated sources, or even gamma-ray burst afterglows), which are are difficult to single out at lower frequencies where the counts are dominated by far more numerous populations. Such surveys may lead to the discovery of populations with extreme properties, such as sources of the general GPS or blazar type but peaking at mm wavelengths, whose existence is hinted by currently available data. At relatively lower flux levels mm counts are dominated by high-redshift dusty galaxies, such as those detected by SCUBA and MAMBO surveys. These data have profound implications for our understanding of the formation and early evolution of galaxies. High sensitivity surveys at cm/mm wavelengths may also detect galaxy- scale Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects due to gas heated by central active nuclei. 1. Introduction The millimeter region is quite a special one, since its corresponds to a minimum in the spectral energy distribution of the Galaxy and of most (but not all) classes of extragalactic sources. The minimum occurs at the cross-over between radio emission, which generally (but not always) decreases with frequency with a power law spectrum (Sν ∝ ν ?αr , with αr ～ 0.5 to 1), and dust emission which steeply rises with frequency (wit