A novel approach for characterizing broad-band radio spectral energy distributions

© 2017 The Authors. We present a new broad-band radio frequency catalogue across 0.12 GHz = v = 20 GHz created by combining data from the Murchison Widefield Array Commissioning Survey, the Australia Telescope 20 GHz survey, and the literature. Our catalogue consists of 1285 sources limited by S20 G...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Harvey, V., Franzen, Thomas, Morgan, John, Seymour, Nick
Format: Journal Article
Published: Oxford University Press 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/71500
Description
Summary:© 2017 The Authors. We present a new broad-band radio frequency catalogue across 0.12 GHz = v = 20 GHz created by combining data from the Murchison Widefield Array Commissioning Survey, the Australia Telescope 20 GHz survey, and the literature. Our catalogue consists of 1285 sources limited by S20 GHz> 40 mJy at 5s, and contains flux density measurements (or estimates) and uncertainties at 0.074, 0.080, 0.119, 0.150, 0.180, 0.408, 0.843, 1.4, 4.8, 8.6, and 20 GHz. We fit a second-order polynomial in log-log space to the spectral energy distributions of all these sources in order to characterize their broad-band emission. For the 994 sources that are well described by a linear or quadratic model we present a new diagnostic plot arranging sources by the linear and curvature terms. We demonstrate the advantages of such a plot over the traditional radio colour-colour diagram. We also present astrophysical descriptions of the sources found in each segment of this new parameter space and discuss the utility of these plots in the upcoming era of large area, deep, broad-band radio surveys.