Future Radio Continuum Cosmology Clustering Surveys

TL;DR

Future radio continuum surveys with ASKAP, MeerKAT, and SKA will vastly increase detected galaxy counts, but technological and intrinsic size limitations may hinder their cosmological utility, especially for multi-tracer bias measurements.

Contribution

This paper analyzes the flux limits and technological constraints of upcoming radio surveys, highlighting challenges in reducing shot noise and measuring galaxy bias.

Findings

Surveys need a flux limit of ~100nJy to reduce shot noise to 10%.

Intrinsic galaxy sizes may impose a hard flux limit around 100nJy.

Insufficient AGN numbers limit multi-tracer bias measurements.

Abstract

The use of continuum emission radio galaxies as cosmological tracers of the large-scale structure will soon move into a new phase. Upcoming surveys from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), MeerKAT, and the Square Kilometre Array project (SKA) will survey the entire available sky down to an ~100uJy flux limit, increasing the number of detected extra-galactic radio sources by several orders of magnitude. External data and machine learning algorithms will also enable some low resolution radial selection (photometric redshift binning) of the sample, increasing the cosmological utility of the sample observed. In this paper, we discuss the flux limit required to detect enough galaxies to decrease the shot noise term in the error to be 10% of the total. We show how future surveys of this type will be limited by available technology. The confusion generated by the intrinsic sizes of galaxies may have the consequence that surveys of this type eventually reach a hard flux limit of ~100nJy, as is predicted by the current modelling of AGN sizes by simulations such as the Tiered Radio Extragalactic Continuum Simulation (T-RECS). Finally, when considering the multi-tracer approach, where galaxies are split by type to measure some bias ratio, we find that there are not enough AGN present to achieve a reasonable level of shot noise for this kind of measurement.