LOFAR: Hundreds of Thousands of New Galaxies

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LOFAR: Hundreds of Thousands of New Galaxies

Post by bystander » Tue Feb 19, 2019 10:27 pm

Hundreds of Thousands of New Galaxies
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) | Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) | 2019 Feb 19

Astronomers publish new sky map detecting a vast number of previously unknown galaxies

An international team of more than 200 astronomers from 18 countries including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has published the first phase of a major new radio sky survey at unprecedented sensitivity using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope. The survey reveals hundreds of thousands of previously undetected galaxies, shedding new light on many research areas including the physics of black holes and how clusters of galaxies evolve.

A special issue of the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics is dedicated to the first twenty-six research papers describing the survey and its first results.

Radio astronomy reveals processes in the Universe that we cannot see with optical instruments. In this first part of the sky survey, LOFAR observed a quarter of the northern hemisphere at low radio frequencies. At this point, approximately ten percent of that data is now made public. It maps three hundred thousand sources, almost all of which are galaxies in the distant Universe; their radio signals have travelled billions of light years before reaching Earth. ...

The 26 research papers in the special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics were done with only the first two percent of the sky survey. The team aims to make sensitive high-resolution images of the whole northern sky, which will reveal 15 million radio sources in total. “Just imagine some of the discoveries we may make along the way. I certainly look forward to it”, says Jackson. “And among these there will be the first massive black holes that formed when the Universe was only a ‘baby’, with an age a few percent of its present age”, adds Röttgering.

The LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey II. First data release ~ T. W. Shimwell et al The LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey III. First Data Release: optical/IR identifications and value-added catalogue ~ W. L. Williams et al The LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey IV. First Data Release: Photometric redshifts and rest-frame magnitudes ~ Kenneth J Duncan et al LOFAR observations of the XMM-LSS field ~ C. L. Hale et al Systematic effects in LOFAR data: A unified calibration strategy ~ F. de Gasperin et al A low-frequency view of mixed-morphology supernova remnant VRO 42.05.01, and its neighbourhood ~ M. Arias et al The first detection of radio recombination lines at cosmological distances ~ K. L. Emig et al Calibrating the relation of low-frequency radio continuum to star formation rate at 1 kpc scale with LOFAR ~ V. Heesen et al CHANG-ES XII: A LOFAR and VLA view of the edge-on star-forming galaxy NGC 3556 ~ A. Miskolczi et al The environments of radio-loud AGN from the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS) ~ J. H. Croston et al LoTSS/HETDEX: Optical quasars I. Low-frequency radio properties of optically selected quasars ~ Gülay Gürkan et al Radio-loud AGN in the first LoTSS data release: The lifetimes and environmental impact of jet-driven sources ~ M. J. Hardcastle et al LoTSS DR1: Double-double radio galaxies in the HETDEX field ~ V. H. Mahatma et al Blazars in the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey first data release ~ S. Mooney et al The origin of radio emission in broad absorption line quasars: Results from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey ~ L. K. Morabito et al The intergalactic magnetic field probed by a giant radio galaxy ~ S. P. O'Sullivan et al The LoTSS view of radio AGN in the local Universe. The most massive galaxies are always switched on ~ J. Sabater et al LoTSS/HETDEX: Disentangling star formation and AGN activity in gravitationally lensed radio-quiet quasars ~ H. R. Stacey et al The spectacular cluster chain Abell 781 as observed with LOFAR, GMRT, and XMM-Newton ~ A. Botteon et al Radio observations of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520 ~ D. N. Hoang et al Characterizing the radio emission from the binary galaxy cluster merger Abell 2146 ~ D. N. Hoang et al Ultra-steep spectrum emission in the merging galaxy cluster Abell 1914 ~ S. Mandal et al Exploring the properties of low-frequency radio emission and magnetic fields in a sample
of compact galaxy groups using the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS) ~ B. Nikiel-Wroczyński et al A LOFAR study of non-merging massive galaxy clusters ~ Federica Savini et al Evolutionary phases of merging clusters as seen by LOFAR ~ Amanda Wilber et al
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