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Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU): A pilot search for diffuse, non-thermal radio emission in galaxy clusters with the Australian SKA Pathfinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2024

S.W. Duchesne*
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Bentley, WA, Australia
A. Botteon
Affiliation:
INAF-IRA, Bologna, Italy
B.S. Koribalski
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Epping, NSW, Australia Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
F. Loi
Affiliation:
INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari, Selargius, Italy
K. Rajpurohit
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA
C.J. Riseley
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Bentley, WA, Australia Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Bologna, Italy INAF–Istituto di Radioastronomia, Bologna, Italy
L. Rudnick
Affiliation:
Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
T. Vernstrom
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Bentley, WA, Australia ICRAR, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
H. Andernach
Affiliation:
Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany Depto. de Astronomía, Univ. de Guanajuato, Callejón de Jalisco s/n, Guanajuato, GTO, Mexico
A.M. Hopkins
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
A.D. Kapinska
Affiliation:
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, NM, USA
R.P. Norris
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Epping, NSW, Australia Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
T. Zafar
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
*
Corresponding author: S.W. Duchesne; Email: stefan.duchesne.astro@gmail.com
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Abstract

Clusters of galaxies have been found to host Mpc-scale diffuse, non-thermal radio emission in the form of central radio halos and peripheral relics. Turbulence and shock-related processes in the intra-cluster medium are generally considered responsible for the emission, though details of these processes are still not clear. The low surface brightness makes detection of the emission a challenge, but with recent surveys with high-sensitivity radio telescopes we are beginning to build large samples of these sources. The Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) is a Southern Sky survey being performed by the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) over the next few years and is well-suited to detect and characterise such emission. To assess prospects of the full survey, we have performed a pilot search of diffuse sources in 71 clusters from the Planck Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) cluster catalogue (PSZ2) found in archival ASKAP observations. After re-imaging the archival data and performing both (u, v)-plane and image-plane angular scale filtering, we detect 21 radio halos (12 for the first time, excluding an additional six candidates), 11 relics (in seven clusters, and six for the first time, excluding a further five candidate relics), along with 12 other, unclassified diffuse radio sources. From these detections, we predict the full EMU survey will uncover up to $\approx 254$ radio halos and $\approx 85$ radio relics in the 858 PSZ2 clusters that will be covered by EMU. The percentage of clusters found to host diffuse emission in this work is similar to the number reported in recent cluster surveys with the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) Two-metre Sky Survey [Botteon, et al. 2022a, A&A, 660, A78], suggesting EMU will complement similar searches being performed in the Northern Sky and provide us with statistically significant samples of halos and relics at the completion of the full survey. This work presents the first step towards large samples of the diffuse radio sources in Southern Sky clusters with ASKAP and eventually the SKA.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Astronomical Society of Australia
Figure 0

Figure 1. The distribution of cluster mass with redshift for the PSZ2 catalogue (gray crosses) and the sample used in this work (pink circles) for clusters with reported redshifts. A vertical dotted line is drawn at $z=0.2$, the redshift we assume for clusters with no reported redshift. The horizontal line is drawn at $M_{\text{SZ,500}} = 5\times10^{14}$ M$_\odot$.

Figure 1

Table 1. Archival ASKAP observations used in this work.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Equatorial map centered on $(\alpha_{\text{J2000}},\delta_{\text{J2000}}) = (0, 0)^{\circ}$ showing the sky coverage of the ASKAP observations used in this work (shaded gray regions). The pink circles indicate the locations of the PSZ2 clusters used in this work. The black, dashed lines are drawn at Galactic latitudes $b \pm 5^{\circ}$.

Figure 3

Table 2. PSZ2 clusters covered by the archival ASKAP data shown in this work.

Figure 4

Figure 3. PSZ2 G241.79$-$24.01 in beam 5 of SB9596 in the archival image (left) and the phase-rotated and self-calibrated robust 0.0 image (right). The dynamic range for each image is shown in the top right of each panel. The red circle is centred on PSZ2 G241.79$-$24.01 and has a radius of 1 Mpc at the cluster’s redshift ($z=0.1392$). The linear colour scale is the same in each panel and shown in the range $[-150, 1000]$$\mu$Jy beam$^{-1}$.

Figure 5

Figure 4. Example beam 5 from SB9596 – a corner beam in the closepack36 footprint. The background is the template image prior to directional self-calibration and source subtraction, used to generate the beam model. Overlaid are the sources used in modelling, coloured by the ratio of the measured flux density to the model flux density ($S_{\text{image}}/S_{\text{model}}$). Also overlaid are contours from the model beam, in levels of [0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9]. The larger dashed, black circle indicates the 2.25-deg radius within which sources are selected. The red star indicates the location of PSZ2 G241.79$-$24.01.

Figure 6

Figure 5. Comparison of the rms noise ($\sigma_{\text{rms}}$, left), peak flux density ($S_{\text{ms}}$, as a function of SBID, centre), and dynamic range (DR, as a function of SBID, right) calculated within 1 Mpc of cluster centres between the new re-processed, robust 0.0 images and the original archival images as they appear on CASDA. The points are coloured by the cluster declination. The solid black lines indicate equal values between the images.

Figure 7

Figure 6. Examples of angular scale filtering. Left. Robust $+0.25$ reference image. Centre left. (u, v)-filtered image, with corresponding taper applied during imaging. Centre right. Image-based filtering using the same scale as the (u, v) filtering. Note the image is convolved to the same resolution as the filter. Right. Image-based filtering used for the EMU survey. Note that the image is convolved to the resolution of the lower filter. The red circles are centred on the cluster with a 1 Mpc radius. Black, dashed contours are drawn on the filtered images at $-3\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}$.

Figure 8

Table 3. Measured properties of the (candidate) diffuse radio sources detected in the PSZ2 clusters.

Figure 9

Figure 7. Example set of images used for identification of sources in PSZ2 G008.31$-$64.74. The colour scales in all radio images are linear between the range $[0, 3\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}]$ and logarithmic in the range $(3\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}, 500\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}]$. The white and black contours are of the bottom right image, and are drawn at $[3, 6, 12, 24, 48]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ in the optical and X-ray panels and at $3\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ in other panels. The solid circle is centred on the reported PSZ2 coordinates and has a 1 Mpc radius at the cluster redshift. Clusters without a measured redshift are assumed to be at $z=0.2$, and the circle is dashed in those cases. Clusters without publicly available XMM-Newton and Chandra observations are shown without an X-ray image. Images of all clusters are made available online. Note that the image-based filtering retains the resolution and brightness units as the original robust $+0.25$ map, and so appears with the same brightness scale as the original robust $+0.25$ image after filtering.

Figure 10

Figure 8. Example images of PSZ2 G006.16$-$69.49 (i) with no diffuse sources and PSZ2 G008.31$-$64.74 (ii) with two relics and a candidate halo. Similar images for all clusters are included in Appendix A. Left panels. The robust $+0.25$ reference image. Right panels. The robust $+0.25$ image, tapered, after subtraction of sources of scales $<250$ kpc. In all panels, the red circle has a 1 Mpc radius at the redshift of the clusters (in Appendix A a dashed circle indicates an assumed redshift of 0.2). For clusters with diffuse emission, the dashed polygon regions indicate the diffuse sources of interest and are the regions used for integrated flux density measurements. The PSF of each image is shown in the bottom right corner.

Figure 11

Figure 9. Flux density ratios as a function of largest angular size/extent. We show the comparison between full measurement (all pixels) and three alternatives: integration over $2\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ (blue, circles), $3\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ (pink, diamonds), and the model flux densities for radio halos (white, stars). A histogram of the distribution of the flux density ratios is also shown. The solid black line indicates a ratio of 1, and the dashed black lines are drawn at flux density ratios of 0.5 and 2.

Figure 12

Figure 10. Example radio halo models fit using Halo-FDCA. Left panels. Compact source-subtracted image used for modelling the halo (and flux density measurements). Right panels. Residual image after subtraction of the model. The model is shown as black contours in both panels (solid: $[1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$, dashed: $0.5\,\sigma_{\text{rms}}$). The left panel colourscales are linear between $[-1, 10]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ and the right panel colourscales are linear between $[-5, 5]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$. Note the surface brightness units are in $\mu$Jy arcsec$^{-2}$ for consistency with the literature.

Figure 13

Figure 11. Counts of the halos (H), candidate halos (cH), relics (R), candidate relics (cR), unclassified sources (U), bridge, and clusters without diffuse emission (NA) in the ASKAP data for all 71 clusters in the sample.

Figure 14

Figure 12. The distribution of PSZ2 clusters across the sky, coloured by their eventual presence in the EMU survey (pink) and LoTSS (blue). Clusters appearing in overlap regions are coloured purple. The expected full EMU survey coverage is coloured grey.

Figure 15

Figure 13. $P_{\text{1.4 GHz}}$$M_{500}$ scaling relation for radio halos ((i)) and radio relics ((ii)). We show radio halos and relics (and candidates) detected in this work, along with the halo and relic samples discovered in the LoTSS-DR2 data (at 144 MHz; Botteon et al., 2022a) and the samples curated by Cuciti et al. (2021a,b, and see references therein) for radio halos and Duchesne et al. (2021a, and see references therein) for radio relics, largely detected at frequencies above $\approx 1$ GHz. Flux densities and luminosities have been scaled to 1.4 GHz assuming $\alpha = -1.3$ for radio halos and $\alpha = -1.2$ for relics as described in the text. Best-fit $P_{1.4}$$M_{500}$ correlations from Cuciti et al. (2021b) and Duchesne et al. (2021a) are shown for halos and relics, respectively.

Figure 16

Figure 14. The mass-redshift distribution of the PSZ2 catalogue (with redshifts) as in Figure 1 but with clusters and their sources from this survey marked as appropriate. Clusters in our sample without detected diffuse emission are labelled ‘NA’. The dashed and dotted black lines indicate $z=0.09$ and $z=0.2$, respectively. The histograms show the distributions of the combined halo and relic counts (pink, including candidates) across the redshift and mass range along with the full PSZ2 sample (grey) and cluster searched in this work (black, with redshifts).

Figure 17

Figure 15. The peak surface brightness as a function of integrated flux density for the diffuse sources.

Figure 18

Figure 16. The ratio of integrated flux density measurements from the (u, v)-filtered and image-filtered maps as a function of largest angular scale of the source. The solid black line is drawn at 1, with the dashed lines indicating ratios of 0.5 and 2. The vertical dotted lines indicate 45 arcsec and 405 arcsec – approximately the image filtering scale, $3\,\theta_{\text{M}}$ and $27\,\theta_{\text{M}}$, respectively.

Figure 19

Table A1. Image noise properties within 2 Mpc of the cluster in $\mu$Jy PSF$^{-1}$.

Figure 20

Table A2. Image PSFs (arcsec $\times$ arcsec, deg).

Figure 21

Figure A1. Radio images of the clusters. Left. The robust $+0.25$ reference image. Right. The robust $+0.25$ image, tapered, after subtraction of sources of scales $<250$ kpc. In both panels, the red circle has a 1 Mpc radius at the redshift of the clusters (dashed indicates an assumed redshift of 0.2). Dashed polygon regions indicate the diffuse sources of interest and are the region used for integrated flux density measurements. The PSF of each image is shown in the bottom right corner.

Figure 22

Figure B1. Radio halo models fit using Halo-FDCA. Left. Compact source-subtracted image used for modelling the halo (and flux density measurements). Right. Residual image after subtraction of the model. The model is shown as black contours in both panels (solid: $[1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$, dashed: $0.5\sigma_{\text{rms}}$). The left panel colourscale is linear between $[-1, 10]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$ and the right panel colourscale is linear between $[-5, 5]\times\sigma_{\text{rms}}$. Grey regions correspond to regions that are masked during fitting. Note the units are in $\mu$Jy arcsec$^{-2}$ for consistency with the literature.