Discovery of 178 Giant Radio Galaxies in 1059 deg$^2$ of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey at 888 MHz

TL;DR

This study identifies 178 new giant radio galaxies larger than 1 Mpc in a specific sky area using ASKAP survey data, significantly expanding the known population of such sources.

Contribution

It presents the discovery of 178 new giant radio galaxies, increasing the known count by 39%, through a visual inspection of ASKAP survey images combined with optical and infrared data.

Findings

178 new giant radio sources discovered

Largest source measures 3.4 Mpc in size

Redshifts range from 0.02 to 2.0

Abstract

We report the results of a visual inspection of images of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) in search of extended radio galaxies (ERG) that reach or exceed linear sizes on the order of one Megaparsec. We searched a contiguous area of 1059deg$^2$ from RA$_{\rm J}$=20$^h$20$^m$ to 06$^h$20$^m$, and $-50^{\circ}<\rm{Dec}_J<-40^{\circ}$, which is covered by deep multi-band optical images of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and in which previously only three ERGs larger than 1Mpc had been reported. For over 1800 radio galaxy candidates inspected, our search in optical and infrared images resulted in hosts for 1440 ERG, for which spectroscopic and photometric redshifts from various references were used to convert their largest angular size (LAS) to projected linear size (LLS). This resulted in 178 newly discovered giant radio sources (GRS) with LLS$>$1Mpc, of which 18 exceed 2Mpc and the largest one is 3.4Mpc. Their redshifts range from 0.02 to $\sim$2.0, but only 10 of the 178 new GRS have spectroscopic redshifts. For the 146 host galaxies the median $r$-band magnitude and redshift are 20.9 and 0.64, while for the 32 quasars or candidates these are 19.7 and 0.75. Merging the six most recent large compilations of GRS results in 458 GRS larger than 1Mpc, so we were able to increase this number by $\sim39\%$ to now 636.