Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), the low-frequency Square Kilometre Array (SKA1 LOW) precursor located in Western Australia, we have completed the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, and present the resulting extragalactic catalogue, utilising the first year of observations. The catalogue covers 24, 831 square degrees, over declinations south of +30 • and Galactic latitudes outside 10 • of the Galactic plane, excluding some areas such as the Magellanic Clouds. It contains 307,455 radio sources with 20 separate flux density measurements across 72-231 MHz, selected from a time-and frequency-integrated image centred at 200 MHz, with a resolution of ≈ 2 . Over the catalogued region, we estimate that the catalogue is 90 % complete at 170 mJy, and 50 % complete at 55 mJy, and large areas are complete at even lower flux density levels. Its reliability is 99.97 % above the detection threshold of 5σ, which itself is typically 50 mJy. These observations constitute the widest fractional bandwidth and largest sky area survey at radio frequencies to date, and calibrate the low frequency flux density scale of the southern sky to better than 10 %. This paper presents details of the flagging, imaging, mosaicking, and source extraction/characterisation, as well as estimates of the completeness and reliability. All source measurements and images are available online . This is the first in a series of publications describing the GLEAM survey results.
Software correlation, where a correlation algorithm written in a high-level language such as C++ is run on commodity computer hardware, has become increasingly attractive for small to medium sized and/or bandwidth constrained radio interferometers. In particular, many long baseline arrays (which typically have fewer than 20 elements and are restricted in observing bandwidth by costly recording hardware and media) have utilized software correlators for rapid, costeffective correlator upgrades to allow compatibility with new, wider bandwidth recording systems and improve correlator flexibility. The DiFX correlator, made publicly available in 2007, has been a popular choice in such upgrades and is now used for production correlation by a number of observatories and research groups worldwide. Here we describe the evolution in the capabilities of the DiFX correlator over the past three years, including a number of new capabilities, substantial performance improvements, and a large amount of supporting infrastructure to ease use of the code. New capabilities include the ability to correlate a large number of phase centers in a single correlation pass, the extraction of phase calibration tones, correlation of disparate but overlapping sub-bands, the production of rapidly sampled filterbank and kurtosis data at minimal cost, and many more.The latest version of the code is at least 15% faster than the original, and in certain situations many times this value. Finally, we also present detailed test results validating the correctness of the new code.
We present a sample of 1,483 sources that display spectral peaks between 72 MHz and 1.4 GHz, selected from the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM) survey. The GLEAM survey is the widest fractional bandwidth all-sky survey to date, ideal for identifying peaked-spectrum sources at low radio frequencies. Our peaked-spectrum sources are the low frequency analogues of gigahertz-peaked spectrum (GPS) and compact-steep spectrum (CSS) sources, which have been hypothesized to be the precursors to massive radio galaxies. Our sample more than doubles the number of known peaked-spectrum candidates, and 95% of our sample have a newly characterized spectral peak. We highlight that some GPS sources peaking above 5 GHz have had multiple epochs of nuclear activity, and demonstrate the possibility of identifying high redshift (z > 2) galaxies via steep optically thin spectral indices and low observed peak frequencies. The distribution of the optically thick spectral indices of our sample is consistent with past GPS/CSS samples but with a large dispersion, suggesting that the spectral peak is a product of an inhomogeneous environment that is individualistic. We find no dependence of observed peak frequency with redshift, consistent with the peakedspectrum sample comprising both local CSS sources and high-redshift GPS sources. The 5 GHz luminosity distribution lacks the brightest GPS and CSS sources of previous samples, implying that a convolution of source evolution and redshift influences the type of peaked-spectrum sources identified below 1 GHz. Finally, we discuss sources with optically thick spectral indices that exceed the synchrotron self-absorption limit.
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