Journal article
A 189 MHz, 2400 deg2 polarization survey with the murchison widefield array 32-element prototype
G Bernardi, LJ Greenhill, DA Mitchell, SM Ord, BJ Hazelton, BM Gaensler, A De Oliveira-Costa, MF Morales, NU Shankar, R Subrahmanyan, RB Wayth, E Lenc, CL Williams, W Arcus, BS Arora, DG Barnes, JD Bowman, FH Briggs, JD Bunton, RJ Cappallo Show all
Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2013
Abstract
We present a Stokes I, Q and U survey at 189 MHz with the Murchison Widefield Array 32 element prototype covering 2400 deg2. The survey has a 15.6 arcmin angular resolution and achieves a noise level of 15 mJy beam-1. We demonstrate a novel interferometric data analysis that involves calibration of drift scan data, integration through the co-addition of warped snapshot images, and deconvolution of the point-spread function through forward modeling. We present a point source catalog down to a flux limit of 4 Jy. We detect polarization from only one of the sources, PMN J0351-2744, at a level of 1.8% ± 0.4%, whereas the remaining sources have a polarization fraction below 2%. Compared to a repo..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions which improved the manuscript. This scientific work uses data obtained from the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. G. B. thanks Matt McQuinn, Roberto Pizzo and Mario Santos for useful discussions about several topics of the present work. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Support for this work comes from the Australian Research Council (grant numbers LE0775621 and LE0882938), the National Science Foundation (grant numbers AST-0457585, AST-0821321, AST-0908884, AST-1008353 and PHY-0835713), the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant number FA9550-0510247), the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, the Australia India Strategic Research Fund, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, MIT Marble Astrophysics Fund, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the NVIDIA sponsored CUDA Center for Excellence at Harvard University, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, a Joint Venture of Curtin University of Technology and The University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government. The Centre for Allsky Astrophysics is an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, funded by grant CE110001020. The MRO is managed by the CSIRO, who also provide operational support to the MWA.