Abstract
Far-infrared (FIR), ultraviolet (UV), and soft X-ray observations are easily degraded by dust and gas between the source and the telescope. They must be made from space, where they are still affected by the interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy. Fortunately the ISM is quite patchy, with several “cosmic windows” covering ∼ 100 deg2 of sky having exceptionally low interstellar extinction and cirrus emission. Since the universe is nearly isotropic, these windows contain representative samples of cosmologically distant sources and will be the targets of deep multiwavelength studies including SWIRE, GALEX/DIS, and XMM-LSS. Overlapping optical and radio surveys provide essential source identifications, redshifts, morphologies, and continuum spectra. The prototype VLA survey (see http://www.cv.nrao.edu/sirtf_fls/) covers the 5 deg2 SIRTF First-Look Survey (FLS) and is being used to identify the expected FIR sources in advance. Most will be star-forming galaxies obeying the very tight far-infrared/radio correlation and thus continuum radio sources stronger than S ≈ 100 μJy at 1.4 GHz. Proposed VLA surveys covering the remaining “cosmic windows” will be useful for studying the evolution of obscured AGNs, clusters, and other uncommon objects.
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