Mosaiced wide-field VLBI observations of the Lockman Hole/XMM

TL;DR

This paper presents a wide-field VLBI survey of 217 radio sources in the Lockman Hole/XMM field, revealing that 15-25% of sub-mJy sources are AGN-driven and characterizing their host galaxies as predominantly early-type or bulge-dominated.

Contribution

It introduces new calibration techniques for wide-field VLBI, including primary beam correction and mosaicing, enabling the detection and analysis of faint AGN in large surveys.

Findings

Detected 65 out of 217 sources with VLBI.

Found 15-25% of sub-mJy sources are AGN-driven.

Most VLBI-detected sources are early-type or bulge-dominated galaxies.

Abstract

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) play a decisive role in galaxy evolution, particularly so when operating in a radiatively inefficient mode, where they launch powerful jets that reshape their surroundings. However, identifying them is difficult, since radio observations commonly have resolutions of between 1 arcsec and 10 arcsec, which is equally sensitive to radio emission from star-forming activity and from AGN. Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations allow one to filter out all but the most compact non-thermal emission from radio survey data. The observational and computational demands to do this in large surveys have been, until recently, too high to make such undertakings feasible. Only the recent advent of wide-field observing techniques have facilitated such observations, and we here present the results from a survey of 217 radio sources in the Lockman Hole/XMM field. We describe in detail some new aspects of the calibration, including primary beam correction, multi-source self-calibration, and mosaicing. As a result, we detected 65 out of the 217 radio sources and were able to construct, for the first time, the source counts of VLBI-detected AGN. They indicate that at least 15%-25% of the sub-mJy radio sources are AGN-driven, consistent with recent findings using other AGN selection techniques. We have used ancillary data to investigate the AGN hosts. We find that among the sources nearby enough to be resolved in the optical images, 88% (23/26) could be classified as early-type or bulge-dominated galaxies. While 50% of these sources are correctly represented by the SED of an early-type galaxy, for the rest the best fit was obtained with a heavily extinct starburst template, an effect we ascribe to a degeneracy in the fit. Overall, the typical hosts of VLBI-detected sources are in good agreement with being early-type or bulge-dominated galaxies.