Bent-Tailed Radio Sources in the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey of the Chandra Deep Field-South

TL;DR

This study catalogs 56 radio sources, including 45 bent-tailed galaxies, in the Chandra Deep Field-South, revealing their properties, associations with galaxy clusters, and implications for future deep radio surveys.

Contribution

First systematic study of bent-tailed radio sources at low powers and high redshifts, demonstrating their prevalence and characteristics in deep, limited-area surveys.

Findings

Detected bent-tailed sources up to redshift 2.1688

Identified associations with galaxy clusters and relics

Predicted large numbers of bent-tailed sources in future surveys

Abstract

Using the 1.4 GHz Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS), supplemented with the 1.4 GHz Very Large Array images, we undertook a search for bent-tailed (BT) radio galaxies in the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDFS). Here we present a catalog of 56 detections, which include 45 bent-tailed sources, four diffuse low-surface-brightness objects (one relic, two halos, and one unclassified object), and a further seven complex, multi-component sources. We report BT sources with rest-frame powers in the range $10^{22} \leq$ $\textrm{P}_{1.4 \textrm{ GHz}} \leq 10^{26}$ W Hz$^{-1}$, redshifts up to 2 and linear extents from tens of kpc up to about one Mpc. This is the first systematic study of such sources down to such low powers and high redshifts and demonstrates the complementary nature of searches in deep, limited area surveys as compared to shallower, large surveys. Of the sources presented here one is the most distant bent-tailed source yet detected at a redshift of 2.1688. Two of the sources are found to be associated with known clusters: a wide-angle tail source in Abell 3141 and a putative radio relic which appears at the infall region between the galaxy group MZ 00108 and the galaxy cluster AMPCC 40. Further observations are required to confirm the relic detection, which if successful would demonstrate this to be the least powerful relic yet seen with $\textrm{P}_{1.4 \textrm{ GHz}} = 9 \times 10^{22}$ W Hz$^{-1}$. Using these data we predict future 1.4 GHz all-sky surveys with a resolution of $\sim$ 10 arcseconds and sensitivity of 10 $\mu$Jy will detect of the order of 560,000 extended low-surface-brightness radio sources of which 440,000 will have a bent-tailed morphology.