Abstract
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a new low-frequency, wide-field-of-view radio interferometer under development at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. We have used a 32 element MWA prototype interferometer (MWA-32T) to observe two 50° diameter fields in the southern sky, covering a total of 2700 deg2, in order to evaluate the performance of the MWA-32T, to develop techniques for epoch of reionization experiments, and to make measurements of astronomical foregrounds. We developed a calibration and imaging pipeline for the MWA-32T, and used it to produce 15′ angular resolution maps of the two fields in the 110-200MHz band. We perform a blind source extraction using these confusion-limited images, and detect 655 sources at high significance with an additional 871 lower significance source candidates. We compare these sources with existing low-frequency radio surveys in order to assess the MWA-32T system performance, wide-field analysis algorithms, and catalog quality. Our source catalog is found to agree well with existing low-frequency surveys in these regions of the sky and with statistical distributions of point sources derived from Northern Hemisphere surveys; it represents one of the deepest surveys to date of this sky field in the 110-200MHz band.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 47 |
Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
Volume | 755 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 10 2012 |
Keywords
- dark ages
- first stars
- instrumentation: interferometers
- methods: data analysis
- reionization
- surveys
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science
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Murchison Widefield Array 110-200MHz observations
Williams, C. L. (Creator), Hewitt, J. N. (Creator), Levine, A. M. (Creator), De Oliveira-Costa, A. (Creator), Bowman, J. (Creator), Briggs, F. H. (Creator), Gaensler, B. M. (Creator), Hernquist, L. L. (Creator), Mitchell, D. A. (Creator), Morales, M. F. (Creator), Sethi, S. K. (Creator), Subrahmanyan, R. (Creator), Sadler, E. M. (Creator), Arcus, W. (Creator), Barnes, D. G. (Creator), Bernardi, G. (Creator), Bunton, J. D. (Creator), Cappallo, R. C. (Creator), Crosse, B. W. (Creator), Corey, B. E. (Creator), Deshpande, A. (Creator), Desouza, L. (Contributor), Emrich, D. (Creator), Goeke, R. F. (Creator), Greenhill, L. J. (Creator), Hazelton, B. J. (Creator), Herne, D. (Creator), Kaplan, D. L. (Creator), Kasper, J. C. (Creator), Kincaid, B. B. (Creator), Koenig, R. (Creator), Kratzenberg, E. (Creator), Lonsdale, C. J. (Creator), Lynch, M. J. (Creator), McWhirter, S. R. (Creator), Morgan, E. H. (Creator), Oberoi, D. (Creator), Ord, S. M. (Creator), Pathikulangara, J. (Creator), Prabu, T. (Creator), Remillard, R. A. (Creator), Rogers, A. E. E. (Contributor), Roshi, D. A. (Creator), Salah, J. E. (Creator), Sault, R. J. (Creator), Shankar, N. U. (Contributor), Srivani, K. S. (Creator), Stevens, J. B. (Creator), Tingay, S. J. (Creator), Wayth, R. B. (Creator), Waterson, M. (Creator), Webster, R. L. (Creator), Whitney, A. R. (Creator), Williams, A. J. (Creator) & Wyithe, J. S. B. (Contributor), Centre de Donnees Strasbourg (CDS), 2014
DOI: 10.26093/cds/vizier.17550047, https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/755/47
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