On the selection of prospective sources for ICRF extension

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the current ICRF source distribution, identifies underpopulated sky regions, and proposes selecting new sources from the OCARS catalog to improve sky coverage and include high-redshift sources for astrophysical interest.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical approach to identify optimal regions for new ICRF sources and utilizes the OCARS catalog for selecting tested, high-redshift candidates.

Findings

Identified less populated sky regions needing more sources.

Proposed using OCARS catalog for source selection.

Highlighted importance of high-redshift sources for astrophysics.

Abstract

Despite continuous increasing of the number of ICRF sources, their sky coverage is still not satisfactory. The goal of this study is to discuss some new considerations for extending the ICRF source list. Statistical analysis of the ICRF catalog allows us to identify less populated sky regions where new ICRF sources or additional observations of the current ICRF sources are most desirable to improve both the uniformity of the source distribution and the uniformity of the distribution of the position errors. It is also desirable to include more sources with high redshift in the ICRF list. These sources may be of interest for astrophysics. To select prospective new ICRF sources, the OCARS catalog is used. The number of sources in OCARS is about three times greater than in the ICRF3, which gives us an opportunity to select new ICRF sources that have already be tested and detected in astrometric and geodetic VLBI experiments.