Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Investigation of #slipstrike sources

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    These are double lobe radio sources for which the axes (or at least one axis) of the lobes does not "point back" to the host. Those identified as such can be found by Searching on "slipstrike" (result), or by following the hashtag #slipstrike. Quite a few can be found in the How to describe the radio morphology? thread.

    In this thread, I'd like to explore and develop ideas around how to categorize these objects, and in particular how to get quantitative.

    I'll start with the #triple in ARG0000a3k, whose host is zph 0.36 SDSS J130854.52+562155.6, a #green object (no, it's not a good example of a slipstrike, or even a bad example! I'm using it for illustration). Here's a FIRST contour overlay:

    enter image description here

    And here's just the radio contours (sorry, rather bigger than I had anticipated):

    enter image description here

    To explore this topic, I think it would be a good idea to be able to generate "ridgelines", which should trace the axes of the lobes (etc); these should be where the jets are (or were, if they've shut down). Here's a hand-drawn attempt to identify these:

    enter image description here

    How to generate these lines automatically? Here's one of my attempts, using Python:

    enter image description here

    Would anyone be interested in seeing the (very ugly!) code?

    Apart from some nice eye candy (or not), what I'd like to do is find a way to quantify the axes, and so show just how misaligned (if that's an appropriate term) the axes are.

    Questions? Comments? Welcome! 😃

    Posted