Probing the bias of radio sources at high redshift

Abstract

The relationship between the clustering of dark matter and that of luminous matter is often described using the bias parameter. Here, we provide a new method to probe the bias of intermediate-to-high-redshift radio continuum sources for which no redshift information is available. We matched radio sources from the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimetres survey data to their optical counterparts in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to obtain photometric redshifts for the matched radio sources. We then use the publicly available semi-empirical simulation of extragalactic radio continuum sources (S3) to infer the redshift distribution for all FIRST sources and estimate the redshift distribution of unmatched sources by subtracting the matched distribution from the distribution of all sources. We infer that the majority of unmatched sources are at higher redshifts than the optically matched sources and demonstrate how the angular scales of the angular two-point correlation function can be used to probe different redshift ranges. We compare the angular clustering of radio sources with that expected for dark matter and estimate the bias of different samples.