SHORES: Serendipitous H-ATLAS-fields Observations of Radio Extragalactic Sources with the ATCA. I: catalog generation and analysis

TL;DR

SHORES is a radio survey using ATCA that cataloged over 2,200 sources in 26 square degrees, providing high-resolution data and insights into the FIR-radio correlation, with future polarization analysis planned.

Contribution

This paper presents the first catalog from the SHORES survey, detailing observations, calibration, and analysis of radio sources in Herschel-ATLAS fields with high reliability and resolution.

Findings

Catalog of 2294 sources with SNR > 4.5

95% reliability above 497.5 μJy

81% of sources unresolved at 3.2×7.2 arcsec resolution

Abstract

We introduce the Serendipitous H-ATLAS-fields Observations of Radio Extragalactic Sources (SHORES) multiple pencil beam survey that observed at 2.1 GHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) 29 fields in total intensity and polarization within the Herschel-ATLAS Southern Galactic Field. This paper presents the observations, calibration and analysis of the 27 shallow fields that cover an overall area of $\sim 26$ square degree with increasing sensitivity towards the phase centers of each pointing according to the ATCA 22 m dish response function, down to $\sigma\lesssim 33\, \mu$Jy. Two additional (deep) fields have been observed to even higher sensitivity. All the SHORES observations have been calibrated to account also for linear polarization. Polarization and deeper field analysis will be presented in future papers. The SHORES shallow-field sample considered in the present paper counts $2294$ sources detected with BLOBCAT to signal-to-noise ratio $SNR\gtrsim 4.5$. Simulations determined that our procedure and final catalog is 95% reliable above $497.5\, \mu$Jy and $95\%$ complete to the $SNR\gtrsim 4.5$ significance level. By exploiting ATCA E-W 6 km configuration we reached resolutions of $3.2\times 7.2$ arcsec, to which level $81\%$ of our sources are unresolved. We determined source counts down to the $150\, \mu$Jy level. For the sources with a counterpart in H-ATLAS, the FIR-radio correlation is calculated and discussed.