Published December 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

A LOFAR sample of luminous compact sources coincident with nearby dwarf galaxies

  • 1. ROR icon University of Amsterdam
  • 2. ROR icon Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
  • 3. ROR icon University of Groningen
  • 4. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 5. ROR icon University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
  • 6. ROR icon Leiden University

Abstract

The vast majority of extragalactic compact continuum radio sources are associated with star formation or jets from (super)massive black holes and, as such, are more likely to be found in association with starburst galaxies or early-type galaxies. Two new populations of radio sources were recently identified: (a) compact and persistent sources (PRSs) associated with fast radio bursts (FRBs) in dwarf galaxies and (b) compact sources in dwarf galaxies that could belong to the long-sought population of intermediate-mass black holes. Despite the interesting aspects of these newly found sources, the current sample size is small, limiting scrutiny of the underlying population. Here, we present a search for compact radio sources coincident with dwarf galaxies. We search the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS), the most sensitive low-frequency (144 MHz central frequency) large-area survey for optically thin synchrotron emission to date. Exploiting the high spatial resolution (6″) and low astrometric uncertainty (∼0.″2) of the LoTSS, we match its compact sources to the compiled sample of dwarf galaxies in the Census of the Local Universe, an Hα survey with the Palomar Observatory 48 inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. We identify 29 over-luminous compact radio sources, evaluate the probability of chance alignment within the sample, investigate the potential nature of these sources, and evaluate their volumetric density and volumetric rate. While optical line-ratio diagnostics on the nebular lines from the host galaxies support a star-formation origin rather than an AGN origin, future high-angular-resolution radio data are necessary to ascertain the origin of the radio sources. We discuss planned strategies to differentiate between candidate FRB hosts and intermediate-mass black holes.

Copyright and License

© The Authors 2023. Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

This work was carried out in part through funding from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Future, an EU-funded H2020 project. D.V. thanks Benito Marcote, Shivani Bhandari, Kenzie Nimmo, and Betsey Adams for valuable discussions. We thank our referee for constructive comments. LOFAR is the Low Frequency Array designed and constructed by ASTRON. It has observing, data processing, and data storage facilities in several countries, which are owned by various parties (each with their own funding sources), and which are collectively operated by the ILT foundation under a joint scientific policy. The ILT resources have benefited from the following recent major funding sources: CNRS-INSU, Observatoire de Paris and Université d’Orléans, France; BMBF, MIWF-NRW, MPG, Germany; Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI), Ireland; NWO, The Netherlands; The Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK; Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland; The Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Italy. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This research has made use of the VLASS QLimage cutout server at cutouts.cirada.ca, operated by the Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA). CIRADA is funded by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation 2017 Innovation Fund (Project 35999), as well as by the Provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, in collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada, the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. This research is based in part on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. We are honored and grateful for the opportunity of observing the Universe from Maunakea, which has the cultural, historical and natural significance in Hawaii. Part of the data are retrieved from the JVO portal (http://jvo.nao.ac.jp/portal) operated by the NAOJ. Software: Astropy (Astropy Collaboration 201320182022), Astroquery (Ginsburg et al. 2019), (Robitaille & Bressert 2012), Aladin (Boch et al. 2011), Topcat (Taylor 2011), askap_surveys (David Kaplan and Andrew O’Brien (UW-Milwaukee)), matchmaker (Vohl 2023). The custom code used to generate these results is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10018524.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2303.12598 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/680/A98 (URL)
Software: 10.5281/zenodo.10018524 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NNX08AR22G
National Science Foundation
AST-1238877
University of Maryland, Baltimore
Eötvös Loránd University
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Canada Foundation for Innovation

Dates

Accepted
2023-10-03
Available
2023-12-15
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published