A Radio Look at the FIR Sky
Meriem Behiri (INAF - OAS)
Tuesday 13/01/2026 @ 14:00, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
Deep radio surveys are reshaping how we map star formation and black-hole growth across cosmic time, especially when dust hides the usual tracers. With multi-frequency coverage, radio emission shifts from being a convenient label, often shorthand for “AGN-dominated”, to a physical diagnostic, and only the broader multi-wavelength context tells us which evolutionary phase a source is actually in. This talk presents results from deep observations at 2.1, 5.5 and 9 GHz, using them to build a more physical picture of the sub-mJy population. The focus is on how spectral information and radio SED diagnostics, together with far-infrared constraints, change the interpretation of these systems. More broadly, SKA pathfinders and precursors are already opening new windows on the radio sky and challenging the way we think about radio sources: the very low-frequency regime is now accessible, and radio is finally shifting from “a line through two points” to a structured, faceted curve. The key novelty is that this is no longer reserved for the brightest AGN: these richer radio SEDs are becoming measurable for faint sources too. This will become even more pronounced in the coming years, as the SKAO comes online. Here, FIR and (sub-)mm observations become the natural partners: they anchor the dusty, star-forming side of the energy budget and keep the radio story honest. I will close with a short look ahead at how these ideas scale to the next generation observatories, and what they can unlock on the path toward more nearly unbiased galaxy samples.