VLBI properties of compact interplanetary scintillators detected by the Murchison Widefield Array

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that interplanetary scintillation (IPS) combined with VLBI observations effectively identifies compact radio sources, revealing correlations between compactness and scintillation strength, and offers a time-efficient alternative to high-resolution imaging.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic analysis linking IPS-detected sources with VLBI measurements, establishing a correlation between compactness and scintillation index for non-blazar sources.

Findings

Strong correlation between VLBI compactness index and scintillation index in non-blazar sources.

Blazars exhibit high compactness and high scintillation, confirming their known compact nature.

IPS can efficiently identify compact radio sources without extensive high-resolution imaging.

Abstract

Interplanetary scintillation (IPS) provides an approach for identifying the presence of sub-arcsec structures in radio sources, and very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) technique can help verify whether the IPS sources have fine structures on milli-arcsec (mas) scales. We searched the available VLBI archive for the 244 IPS sources detected by the Murchison Widefield Array at 162~MHz and found 63 cross-matches. We analysed the VLBI data of the 63 sources and characterised the compactness index in terms of the ratio $R$ of the VLBI-measured flux density at 4.3~GHz to the flux density estimated using the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) at 3~GHz and NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) at 1.4~GHz ($S_{\rm VLBI}/S_{\rm SA}$). Eleven sources are identified as blazars according to their flat spectra and strong variability. They show high compactness indices with $R>0.4$, compact core-jet structure, and a broad distribution of normalised scintillation index (NSI). Other sources show diverse morphologies (compact core, core and one-sided jet, core and two-sided jets), but there is a correlation between $R$ and NSI with a correlation coefficient $r=0.47$. A similar $R$--NSI correlation is found in sources showing single steep power-law or convex spectra. After excluding blazars (which are already known to be compact sources) from the VLBI-detected IPS sources, a strong correlation is found between the compactness and scintillation index of the remaining samples, indicating that stronger scintillating sources are more compact. This pilot study shows that IPS offers a convenient method to identify compact radio sources without the need to invoke high-resolution imaging observations, which often require significant observational time.