Head Tail Radio Sources from VLA FIRST Survey

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of 607 new Head Tail radio sources from the VLA FIRST survey, classifies them into WAT and NAT types, and analyzes their properties and associations with galaxy clusters.

Contribution

It presents a large sample of newly identified HT radio sources, providing detailed classifications, physical properties, and optical counterparts, enhancing understanding of galaxy cluster environments.

Findings

80% of sources are associated with galaxy clusters.

NAT sources have V-shaped structures with opening angles less than 90°.

Sources are detected up to redshift 2.08.

Abstract

The study of Head Tail (HT) radio galaxies track the information of associated galaxy clusters. With the help of the VLA FIRST survey at 1.4 GHz, we detected 607 new HT radio sources, among them, 398 are Wide Angle Tail (WAT) and 216 are Narrow-Angle Tail (NAT) sources. NAT sources generally have `V' shaped structure with an opening angle less than ninety degrees and for WAT sources opening angle between the jets is more than ninety degrees. We found that almost 80 per cent of our sources are associated with a known galaxy cluster. We mentioned various useful physical properties of these HT sources. Taking advantage of a large sample of newly discovered HT sources, various statistical studies have been done. The luminosity range of sources presented in the current paper is $10^{39}$ $\leq$ $L_{1.4GHz}$ $\leq$ $10^{43}$ erg sec$^{-1}$. We identified optical counterparts for 193 WAT and 104 NAT sources. The sources are found up to redshift 2.08.