Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Looks a little odd in the Radio?

  • Ptd by Ptd

    The Radio image in this one looks different to what I'm use to, there is no hatching in the background forinstance? Is this from a source other than FIRST?

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to Ptd's comment.

    As HAndernach wrote in the Comment, the radio data comes from the ATLAS survey (not FIRST), and the IR comes from SWIRE data (not WISE).

    New ATLAS images for Radio Galaxy Zoo, a GZ blog post of a few days' ago, explains in some more detail.

    What do you reckon the central three sources are, three unrelated #compacts? or a #triple? Or perhaps the central source is a #triple, with the two lobes being the very faint radio sources in the top left (NW?) corner and near the bottom right (SE?) edge?

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  • Ptd by Ptd in response to JeanTate's comment.

    Have now read the blog post 😃
    My astronomy is limited to what I've learned in the Zoo and I've not spent much time looking at this new data yet, but at first glance and looking at the background structure in the radio image I'd question if anything other than the strong central source could be trusted as being anything other than noise?

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to Ptd's comment.

    That's a really great question! 😃

    In these sorts of radio images, noise is difficult to understand (for me anyway); on the one hand, the way the contours are created means that even the lowest contour is likely to indicate non-noise radio emission; on the other hand, the way the radio telescope creates 'images' produces 'noise structures', like the triangular bands in FIRST (for example). In ATLAS, it seems the noise structure might be more like ~vertical bands, not some sort of triangular mesh. However, as I'm sure you've seen many times in the FIRST/WISE images, blips in the radio, even 'below' the lowest contour, can indicate a real radio source (e.g. the host of a doublelobe, making it an almost-triple).

    For me, it's difficult to make a judgement call in cases like this (ARG0003s5b), partly because I've got nothing to compare with, partly because I have no experience with ATLAS/SWIRE images yet.

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  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    I would definitely pick the central source as real but given the "stripeyness" of the radio image, I would not give much weight to these particular single-contour blobs.

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to ivywong's comment.

    Thanks Ivy.

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