The VLBA candels goods-north survey -i. survey design, processing, data products, and source counts

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Date

2024

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Volume Title

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Abstract

The past decade has seen significant advances in wide-field cm-wave very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which is timely given the wide-area, synoptic survey-driven strategy of major facilities across the electromagnetic spectrum. While wide-field VLBI poses significant post-processing challenges that can severely curtail its potential scientific yield, man y dev elopments in the km-scale connected-element interferometer sphere are directly applicable to addressing these. Here we present the design, processing, data products, and source counts from a deep (11 μJy beam -1 ), quasi-uniform sensitivity, contiguous wide-field (160 arcmin 2 ) 1.6 GHz VLBI surv e y of the CANDELS GOODS-North field. This is one of the best-studied extragalactic fields at milli-arcsecond resolution and, therefore, is well-suited as a comparative study for our Tera-pixel VLBI image. The derived VLBI source counts show consistency with those measured in the COSMOS field, which broadly traces the AGN population detected in arcsecond-scale radio surv e ys. Ho we ver, there is a distinctive flattening in the S 1.4GHz ∼100-500 μJy flux density range, which suggests a transition in the population of compact faint radio sources, qualitatively consistent with the excess source counts at 15 GHz that is argued to be an unmodelled population of radio cores

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Keywords

galaxies: active, techniques: high angular resolution, techniques: interferometric, Data handling, Product design

Citation

Deane, R.P., Radcliffe, J.F., Njeri, A., Akoto-Danso, A., Bernardi, G., Smirnov, O.M., Beswick, R., Garrett, M.A., Jarvis, M.J., Whittam, I.H. and Bourke, S., 2024. The VLBA CANDELS GOODS-North Survey–I. survey design, processing, data products, and source counts. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 529(3), pp.2428-2442.