Meerkat discovery of a mightee odd radio circle
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Date
2025
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
We present the discovery of a new Odd Radio Circle (ORC J0219−0505) in 1.2 GHz radio continuum data from the MIGHTEE survey taken with the MeerKAT telescope. The radio-bright host is a massive elliptical galaxy, which shows extended stellar structure, possibly tidal tails or shells, suggesting recent interactions or mergers. The radio ring has a diameter of 35 arcsec, corresponding to 114 kpc at the host galaxy redshift of zspec = 0.196. This MIGHTEE ORC is a factor 3–5 smaller than previous ORCs with central elliptical galaxies. The discovery of this MIGHTEE ORC in a deep but relatively small-area radio survey implies that more ORCs will be found in deeper surveys. While the small numbers currently available are insufficient to estimate the flux density distribution, this is consistent with the simplest hypothesis that ORCs have a flux density distribution similar to that of the general population of extragalactic radio sources.
Description
Keywords
Galaxies: evolution, Radio continuum: galaxies, Telescope, MIGHTEE ORC, Discovery
Citation
Norris, R.P., Koribalski, B.S., Hale, C.L., Jarvis, M.J., Macgregor, P.J. and Taylor, A.R., 2025. MeerKAT discovery of a MIGHTEE Odd Radio Circle. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 537(1), pp.L42-L48.