Status and perspectives of the CRAFTS extra-galactic HI survey
astro-ph.GA
/ Authors
Kai Zhang, Jingwen Wu, Di Li, Marko Krčo, Lister Staveley-Smith, Ningyu Tang, Lei Qian, Mengting Liu, Chengjin Jin, Youling Yue
and 8 more authors
Yan Zhu, Hongfei Liu, Dongjun Yu, Jinghai Sun, Gaofeng Pan, Hui Li, Hengqian Gan, Rui Yao
/ Abstract
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope(FAST) is expected to complete its commissioning in 2019. FAST will soon begin the Commensal Radio Astronomy FasT Survey(CRAFTS), a novel and unprecedented commensal drift scan survey of the entire sky visible from FAST. The goal of CRAFTS is to cover more than 20000 $deg^{2}$ and reach redshift up to about 0.35. We provide empirical measurements of the beam size and sensitivity of FAST across the 1.05 to 1.45 GHz frequency range of the FAST L-band Array of 19-beams(FLAN). Using a simulated HI-galaxy catalogue based on the HI Mass Function(HIMF), we estimate the number of galaxies that CRAFTS may detect. At redshifts below 0.35, over $6\, \times \, 10^{5}$ HI galaxies may be detected. Below the redshift of 0.07, the CRAFTS HIMF will be complete above a mass threshold of $10^{9.5}\,M_{\odot}$. FAST will be able to investigate the environmental and redshift dependence of the HIMF to an unprecedented depth, shedding light onto the missing baryon and missing satellite problems.