Journal article
The giant lobes of centaurus a observed at 118MHz with the murchison widefield array
B McKinley, F Briggs, BM Gaensler, IJ Feain, G Bernardi, RB Wayth, M Johnston-Hollitt, AR Offringa, W Arcus, DG Barnes, JD Bowman, JD Bunton, RJ Cappallo, BE Corey, AA Deshpande, L deSouza, D Emrich, R Goeke, LJ Greenhill, BJ Hazelton Show all
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Published : 2013
Abstract
We present new wide-field observations of Centaurus A (Cen A) and the surrounding region at 118MHz with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) 32-tile prototype, with which we investigate the spectral-index distribution of Cen A's giant radio lobes.We compare our images to 1.4 GHz maps of Cen A and compute spectral indices using temperature-temperature plots and spectral tomography. We find that the morphologies at 118MHz and 1.4 GHz match very closely apart from an extra peak in the southern lobe at 118 MHz, which provides tentative evidence for the existence of a southern counterpart to the northern middle lobe of Cen A. Our spatially averaged spectral indices for both the northern and southe..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
This scientific work makes use of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, operated by CSIRO. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Support for the MWA comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation (grants AST-0457585, PHY-0835713, CAREER-0847753 and AST-0908884), the Australian Research Council (LIEF grants LE0775621 and LE0882938), the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant FA9550-0510247), and the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence funded by grant CE110001020). Support is also provided by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, and the Victoria University of Wellington (via grant MED-E1799 from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development and an IBM Shared University Research Grant). The Australian Federal government provides additional support via the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, Education Investment Fund, and the Australia India Strategic Research Fund, and Astronomy Australia Limited, under contract to Curtin University. We acknowledge the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the Initiative in Innovative Computing and the CUDA Center for Excellence sponsored by NVIDIA at Harvard University, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a Joint Venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government. We would like to thank P. Leahy for many constructive comments and suggestions that served to improve the manuscript.