EMU is a wide-field radio continuum survey planned for the new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. The primary goal of EMU is to make a deep (rms ,10 mJy/beam) radio continuum survey of the entire Southern sky at 1.3 GHz, extending as far North as þ308 declination, with a resolution of 10 arcsec. EMU is expected to detect and catalogue about 70 million galaxies, including typical star-forming galaxies up to z , 1, powerful starbursts to even greater redshifts, and active galactic nuclei to the edge of the visible Universe. It will undoubtedly discover new classes of object. This paper defines the science goals and parameters of the survey, and describes the development of techniques necessary to maximise the science return from EMU.

Star‐forming galaxies are thought to dominate the sub‐mJy radio population, but recent work has shown that low‐luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can still make a significant contribution to the faint radio source population. Spectral indices are an important tool for understanding the emission mechanism of the faint radio sources. We have observed the extended Chandra Deep Field South at 5.5 GHz using a mosaic of 42 pointings with the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Our image reaches an almost uniform sensitivity of ∼12 μJy rms over 0.25 deg2 with a restoring beam of 4.9 arcsec × 2.0 arcsec, making ATLAS 5.5 GHz survey one of the deepest 6 cm surveys to date. We present the 5.5 GHz catalogue and source counts from this field. We take advantage of the large amount of ancillary data in this field to study the 1.4 to 5.5 GHz spectral indices of the sub‐mJy population. For the full 5.5 GHz selected sample we find a flat median spectral index, αmed = −0.40, which is consistent with previous results. However, the spectral index appears to steepen at the faintest flux density levels (S5.5 GHz < 0.1 mJy), where αmed = −0.68. We performed stacking analysis of the faint 1.4 GHz selected sample (40

At the faintest radio flux densities (S_1.4 < 10 mJy), conflicting results have arisen regarding whether there is a flattening of the average spectral index between a low radio frequency (325 or 610 MHz), and e.g. 1.4 GHz. We present a new catalogue of 843 MHz radio sources in the ELAIS-S1 field that contains the sources, their ATLAS counterparts, and the spectral index distributions of the sources as a function of flux density. We do not find any statistically significant evidence for a trend towards flatter spectral indices with decreasing flux density. We then investigate the spectral index distribution with redshift for those sources with reliable redshifts and explore the infrared properties. An initial sample of faint Compact Steep Spectrum sources in ATLAS is also presented, with a brief overview of their properties.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 18 pages, 19 figures, 6 tables. The full version of Table 1 will be available in the online version of the articl