Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Radio stripes

  • f.trara by f.trara

    What do these stripes represent? Radio emission from stars in our galaxy?
    Thanks fabrizio

    Posted

  • JeanTate 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:

    enter image description here

    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

    enter image description here

    Hope this helps, and happy hunting! 😃

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Thanks @JeanTate for your explanation again.

    Posted