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Description
The Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS) aims to image a 7 deg<sup>2</sup> region centered on the European Large Area ISO Survey - South 1 (ELAIS-S1) field and the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S) at 1.4 GHz with high sensitivity (up to sigma ~ 10 uJy) to study the evolution of star-forming galaxies (SFGs) and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) over a wide range of cosmic time. The main goal of the present work is to study the radio spectra of an unprecedentedly large sample of sources (~ 2000 observed, ~ 600 detected in both frequencies). This table contains the results from ancillary radio observations at a frequency of 2.3 GHz which were obtained with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). It comprises the catalog of sources with measured 1.4 GHz to 2.3 GHz spectral indices (Table 2 in the reference paper), compiled in the framework of ATLAS. It comprises only such sources which have unambiguous detections at both 1.4 GHz and 2.3 GHz, so no upper or lower limits on the spectral index based on non-detections are included. The 2.3-GHz detection limit is 300 uJy (equivalent to 4.5 sigma in the ELAIS-S1 field and 4.0 sigma in the CDF-S). The authors compute spectral indices between 1.4 GHz and 2.3 GHz using matched-resolution images and investigate various properties of their source sample in their dependence on their spectral indices. The authors find the entire source sample to have a median spectral index of -0.74, in good agreement with both the canonical value of -0.7 for optically thin synchrotron radiation and other spectral index studies conducted by various groups. Regarding the radio spectral index Alpha as indicator for source type, they find only marginal correlations so that flat or inverted spectrum sources are usually powered by AGN and hence conclude that, at least for the faint population, the spectral index is not a strong discriminator. They investigate the z-Alpha relation for their source sample and find no such correlation between spectral index and redshift at all. The authors do find a significant correlation between redshift and radio to near-infrared flux ratio, making this a much stronger tracer of high-z radio sources. They also find no evidence for a dependence of the radio-IR correlation on spectral index. This table was created by the HEASARC in August 2012 based on <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/544/A38">CDS Catalog J/A+A/544/A38</a> file spix_pub.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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