Figure 15: Small-number bias of the scale factor estimates derived from a synthetic population of
sources where the true number of sources is known. Left panel: An edge-on view of a model Galactic
source population. Right panel: The thick line shows , the true number of objects in the model
Galaxy, plotted against , the number detected by a flux-limited survey. The thin solid line
shows , the median sum of the scale factors, as a function of from a large number of
Monte Carlo trials. Dashed lines show 25 and 75% percentiles of the distribution.
|