We present the results of a 21cm radio continuum aperture synthesis mosaic of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), made by combining data from 1344 separate pointing centers using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the 64-m Parkes single-dish telescope. The resolution of the mosaicked images is 55' ( 10 pc, using a distance to the LMC) and a region 10° X 12° is surveyed.

In the past, it. was very difficult to distinguish thermal and non-thermal emission. Broadbent et a1. (1989) has developed a new technique with the help of the IRAS 60 micron emission. The distribution of non-thermal or synchrotron emission in the Galactic disk has been modeled from the 408 MHz all sky survey of Haslam et a1. (1982) after removal of the thermal component.. At. 408 MHz, t.here is very little absorption in the interstellar medium and the distribution along the line-of-sight. is inferred mainly from its presumed relationship to other tracers of spiral structure via a. number of fitted parameters. But. at lower frequencies, free-free absorption becomes important and can give some direct. information on the line of sight. distribution. We have modeled the thermal electron density according to the spiral arm models and the distribution of ionized hydrogen in the Galactic plane by Lockman (1976) and Cersosimo et. al. (1989) and have made predictions to compare with the surveys of Dwarakanath et al. (1990) at. 34.5 MHz and .Jones and Finlay (1974) at 29.9 MHz. The result confirms that the absorption model of the synchrotron emissivity in the Galactic plane is broadly corrected and illustrates the potential of the absorption technique.

We have decomposed the 11-cm radio continuum emission of the W51 complex into thermal and non-thermal components. The distribution of the thermal emission has been determined by analyzing HI, CO, and IRAS 60-μm data. We have found a good correlation between the 11-cm thermal continuum and the 60- 11m emissions, which is used to obtain the thermal and non-thermal 11-cm continuum maps of the W51 complex. Most of the thermal continuum is emanating from the compact H II regions and their low-density ionized envelopes in W51A and W51B. All the H II regions, except G49.1-0.4 in W51B, have associated molecular clumps. The thermal radio continuum fluxes of the compact H II regions are proportional to the CO fluxes of molecular clumps. This is consistent with the previous results that the total mass of stars in an H II region is proportional to the mass of the associated molecular clump. According to our result, there are three non-thermal continuum sources in W51: G49.4-0.4 in W51A, a weak source close to G49.2-0.3 in W51B, and the shell source W51C. The non-thermal flux of G49.5-0.4 at 11-cm is ~28 Jy, which is ~25% of its total 11-cm flux. The radio continuum spectrum between 0.15 and 300 GHz also suggests an excess emission over thermal free-free emission. We show that the excess emission can be described as a non-thermal emission with a spectral index α≃-1.0 (Sv∝Va) attenuated by thermal free-free absorptions at low-frequencies. The non-thermal source close to G49.2-0.3 is weak (~9 Jy). The nature of the source is not known and the reality of the non-thermal emission needs to be confirmed. The non~thermal shell source W51C has a 11-cm flux of ~130Jy and a spectral index α≃-0.26.