CAESAR source finder: recent developments and testing

TL;DR

This paper discusses recent enhancements to the CAESAR source finder tool, optimized for automated detection of compact and extended radio sources in large ASKAP Galactic Plane surveys, with performance evaluations on simulated data.

Contribution

The paper introduces improvements to CAESAR for better scalability, performance, and usability in processing large radio astronomy datasets, especially for Galactic Plane surveys.

Findings

CAESAR effectively detects both compact and extended sources.

Performance characterized using simulated radio maps.

Enhancements improve scalability and usability.

Abstract

A new era in radioastronomy will begin with the upcoming large-scale surveys planned at the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). ASKAP started its Early Science program in October 2017 and several target fields were observed during the array commissioning phase. The SCORPIO field was the first observed in the Galactic Plane in Band 1 (792-1032 MHz) using 15 commissioned antennas. The achieved sensitivity and large field of view already allow to discover new sources and survey thousands of existing ones with improved precision with respect to previous surveys. Data analysis is currently ongoing to deliver the first source catalogue. Given the increased scale of the data, source extraction and characterization, even in this Early Science phase, have to be carried out in a mostly automated way. This process presents significant challenges due to the presence of extended objects and diffuse emission close to the Galactic Plane. In this context we have extended and optimized a novel source finding tool, named CAESAR , to allow extraction of both compact and extended sources from radio maps. A number of developments have been done driven by the analysis of the SCORPIO map and in view of the future ASKAP Galactic Plane survey. The main goals are the improvement of algorithm performances and scalability as well as of software maintainability and usability within the radio community. In this paper we present the current status of CAESAR and report a first systematic characterization of its performance for both compact and extended sources using simulated maps. Future prospects are discussed in light of the obtained results.