Radio Astronomy 2

The course is organized around an introduction and three main topics. In the introduction we will recon the main emission and absorption mechanisms of electromagnetic signals from the radio to the sub-millimetric domains.
The three topics are:
The galactic diffuse emission. In this part we will deal with the main diffuse galactic emissions (synchrotron, free-free and interstellar dust) and the main scientific questions linked to these emissions. We will also discuss recent results like the anomalous dust emission, the indirect observation of molecular hydrogen and its correlation with CO, the measurement of the structure of the galactic magnetic field derived from the measurement of the polarized dust emission
Emissions from discrete sources. In this part we will focus on radio emissions from discrete sources: Sun, pulsars, radio-galaxies. We will also deal with sub-millimetric emissions linked to star formation mechanisms
Background emissions. In this part we will concentrate on background emissions. In particular the cosmic microwave background (CMB), that traces the structure of the universe at the time when matter and radiation decoupled, the cosmic infrared background (CIB), resulting from primordial star formation processes, the 21-cm background, that can be used to understand the universe reionizaion history. We will also discuss the use of the CMB as a backlight to observe galaxy clusters exploiting the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, and to measure the dark matter distribution exploiting the lensing effect on the CMB.