Radio stripes
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by f.trara
What do these stripes represent? Radio emission from stars in our galaxy?
Thanks fabrizioPosted
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by JeanTate in response to f.trara's comment.
Welcome to RGZ. f.trara.
They are artifacts, spurious radio sources. And they are, unfortunately, an unavoidable side-effect of how these radio 'images' are produced: FIRST, the radio survey from which the radio part of the RGZ images is derived, is a survey based on radio interferometry (ATNF link explaining this); the 'telescope' is the VLA, which as you can see in this picture has 'dishes' in a Y-shape:
Because it's a Y-shape, the radio noise looks stripy, usually with three sets of stripes, forming a kinda triangular grid.
You can think of this sort of stripy stuff as a kind of radio 'noise', which shows up as the blotchy, triangular-shaped background in this image, of the same part of the sky (just a bit bigger), produced by processing the data from FIRST in a slightly different way
Hope this helps, and happy hunting! 😃
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by ivywong scientist, admin
Thanks @JeanTate for your explanation again.
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