New ASKAP radio-continuum surveys of the Small Magellanic Cloud

TL;DR

This paper presents new radio continuum surveys of the Small Magellanic Cloud using ASKAP, providing extensive source catalogues at two frequencies that enhance understanding of the galaxy's radio source populations.

Contribution

The study introduces new ASKAP radio source catalogues for the SMC at two frequencies, combined with MeerKAT data, to analyze spectral indices and source populations.

Findings

Catalogues contain over 36,000 sources at 944 MHz and 15,000 at 1367 MHz.

Cross-matching with MeerKAT identified over 21,000 and 12,000 common sources.

Results demonstrate ASKAP's capability to study galactic radio sources.

Abstract

We present two new radio continuum images from the ASKAP POSSUM survey in the direction of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The two new source lists contain 36,571 radio continuum sources detected at 944 MHz and 15,227 sources at 1367 MHz, with beam sizes of approximately 14.5 by 12.2 arcsec and 8.7 by 8.2 arcsec, respectively. We used the Aegean software package to generate these point source catalogues, and together with the previously published MeerKAT catalogue, we estimated spectral indices for the full set of matched radio point sources. By cross-matching our ASKAP catalogues with the MeerKAT data, we identified 21,442 and 12,654 common point sources at 944 MHz and 1367 MHz, respectively, using a 2 arcsec matching radius. These new catalogues improve our understanding of the Small Magellanic Cloud and demonstrate the capability of current radio telescopes such as ASKAP to investigate diverse galactic source populations