Bibcode
Rodighiero, G.; Lari, C.; Franceschini, A.; Gregnanin, A.; Fadda, D.
Referencia bibliográfica
Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 343, Issue 4, pp. 1155-1171.
Fecha de publicación:
8
2003
Número de citas
22
Número de citas referidas
18
Descripción
We report results from a new analysis of a deep 95-μm imaging survey
with the photopolarimeter ISOPHOT on-board the Infrared Space
Observatory, over a 40 × 40 arcmin2 area within the
Lockman Hole. To this end we exploit a newly developed parametric
algorithm able to identify and clean spurious signals induced by cosmic
rays impacts and by transient effects and non-linearities in the
detectors. These results provide us with the currently deepest - to our
knowledge - far-infrared (far-IR) image of the extragalactic sky. Within
the survey area, we detect 36 sources with signal-to-noise ratio S/N
> 3 (corresponding to a flux of 16 mJy), making up a complete
flux-limited sample for S95μm>= 100 mJy. Reliable
sources are detected, with decreasing but well-controlled completeness,
down to S95μm~= 20 mJy. The source extraction process and
the completeness, the photometric and astrometric accuracies of this
catalogue have been tested by us with extensive simulations accounting
for all the details of the procedure. We estimate source counts down to
a flux of ~30 mJy, at which limit we evaluate that 10-20 per cent of the
cosmic IR background (CIRB) has been resolved into sources (contributing
to the CIRB intensity ~=2.0 × 10-9 W m-2
sr-1).
The 95-μm galaxy counts reveal a steep slope at
S95μm<= 100 mJy (α~= 1.6), in excess of that
expected for a non-evolving source population. The shape of these counts
agrees with those determined by ISO at 15 and 175 μm, and starts
setting strong constraints on the evolution models for the far-IR galaxy
populations.