The MURALES survey II. Presentation of MUSE observations of 20 3C low-z radio galaxies and first results

TL;DR

This survey presents deep VLT/MUSE observations of 20 low-redshift 3C radio galaxies, revealing extensive ionized gas structures and complex kinematics, providing insights into AGN feedback and radio morphology correlations.

Contribution

First comprehensive MUSE-based analysis of a complete sample of low-z 3C radio galaxies, linking emission line structures with radio morphology and excitation class.

Findings

Extended ionized gas structures up to 17 kpc observed.

Ordered rotation in nine sources, complex kinematics in others.

Correlation between radio morphology and emission line properties.

Abstract

We present observations of a complete sub-sample of 20 radio galaxies from the Third Cambridge Catalog (3C) with redshift <0.3 obtained from VLT/MUSE optical integral field spectrograph. These data have been obtained as part of the survey MURALES (a MUse RAdio Loud Emission line Snapshot survey) with the main goal of exploring the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) feedback process in a sizeable sample of the most powerful radio sources at low redshift. We present the data analysis and, for each source, the resulting emission line images and the 2D gas velocity field. Thanks to their unprecedented depth (the median 3 sigma surface brightness limit in the emission line maps is 6X10^-18 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2, these observations reveal emission line structures extending to several tens of kiloparsec in most objects. In nine sources the gas velocity shows ordered rotation, but in the other cases it is highly complex. 3C sources show a connection between radio morphology and emission line properties. Whereas, in three of the four Fanaroff and Riley Class I radio galaxies (FRIs), the line emission regions are compact, ~1 kpc in size; in all but one of the Class II radiogalaxies FRIIs, we detected large scale structures of ionized gas with a median extent of 17 kpc. Among the FRIIs, those of high and low excitation show extended gas structures with similar morphological properties, suggesting that they both inhabit regions characterized by a rich gaseous environment on kpc scale.