The KHOLOD Experiment: A Search for a New Population of Radio Sources
  Published data from long-term observations of a strip of sky at declination
+5 degrees carried out at 7.6 cm on the RATAN-600 radio telescope are used to
estimate some statistical properties of radio sources. Limits on the
sensitivity of the survey due to noise imposed by background sources, which
dominates the radiometer sensitivity, are refined. The vast majority of noise
due to background sources is associated with known radio sources (for example,
from the NVSS with a detection threshold of 2.3 mJy) with normal steep spectra
({\alpha} = 0.7-0.8, S \propto {\nu}^{- \alpha}), which have also been detected
in new deep surveys at decimeter wavelengths. When all such objects are removed
from the observational data, this leaves another noise component that is
observed to be roughly identical in independent groups of observations. We
suggest this represents a new population of radio sources that are not present
in known catalogs at the 0.6 mJy level at 7.6 cm. The studied redshift
dependence of the number of steep-spectrum objects shows that the sensitivity
of our survey is sufficient to detect powerful FRII radio sources at any
redshift, right to the epoch of formation of the first galaxies. The inferred
new population is most likely associated with low-luminosity objects at
redshifts z < 1. In spite of the appearance of new means of carrying out direct
studies of distant galaxies, searches for objects with very high redshifts
among steep and ultra-steep spectrum radio sources remains an effective method
for studying the early Universe.
