The giant lobes of Centaurus A observed at 118 MHz with the Murchison Widefield Array

TL;DR

This study uses 118 MHz observations from the Murchison Widefield Array to analyze the spectral properties and morphology of Centaurus A's giant radio lobes, revealing evidence of multiple activity episodes and potential new features.

Contribution

First detailed low-frequency spectral mapping of Centaurus A's lobes, showing morphological and spectral variations supporting multiple outbursts from the central engine.

Findings

Spectral indices consistent with previous studies

Detection of an extra peak in the southern lobe at 118 MHz

Evidence supporting multiple outbursts of activity

Abstract

We present new wide-field observations of Centaurus A (Cen A) and the surrounding region at 118 MHz 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 118 MHz 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 southern lobes are consistent with previous analyses, however we find significant spatial variation of the spectra across the extent of each lobe. Both the spectral-index distribution and the morphology at low radio frequencies support a scenario of multiple outbursts of activity from the central engine. Our results are consistent with inverse-Compton modelling of radio and gamma-ray data that supports a value for the lobe age of between 10 and 80 Myr.