What will the next generation radio telescope detect at 1.4 GHz?

Abstract

An international project is underway to design and build a radio telescope with an effective collecting area two orders of magnitude greater than the largest existing instruments. One of the many scientific goals of this instrument will be the investigation of the extragalactic radio source population at flux densities two to three orders of magnitude fainter than the limits of existing observations. We present simulations of the radio sky at 1.4 GHz down to a flux density limit of 0.1 microJy using extrapolations of known radio luminosity functions for two different population scenarios. The resulting simulations confirm that a resolution of 0.1" is necessary to avoid formal confusion, but source blending may still dominate if the intrinsic size of such faint sources is larger than a few kiloparsecs.