Journal article
MIGHTEE: deep 1.4 GHz source counts and the sky temperature contribution of star forming galaxies and active galactic nuclei
- Abstract:
- We present deep 1.4 GHz source counts from ∼5 deg2 of the continuum Early Science data release of the MeerKAT International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) survey down to S1.4GHz ∼15 μJy. Using observations over two extragalactic fields (COSMOS and XMM-LSS), we provide a comprehensive investigation into correcting the incompleteness of the raw source counts within the survey to understand the true underlying source count population. We use a variety of simulations that account for: errors in source detection and characterisation, clustering, and variations in the assumed source model used to simulate sources within the field and characterise source count incompleteness. We present these deep source count distributions and use them to investigate the contribution of extragalactic sources to the sky background temperature at 1.4 GHz using a relatively large sky area. We then use the wealth of ancillary data covering a subset of the COSMOS field to investigate the specific contributions from both active galactic nuclei (AGN) and star forming galaxies (SFGs) to the source counts and sky background temperature. We find, similar to previous deep studies, that we are unable to reconcile the sky temperature observed by the ARCADE 2 experiment. We show that AGN provide the majority contribution to the sky temperature contribution from radio sources, but the relative contribution of SFGs rises sharply below 1 mJy, reaching an approximate 15-25 per cent contribution to the total sky background temperature (Tb ∼100 mK) at ∼15 μJy.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.2MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/mnras/stac3320
Authors
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society More from this journal
- Volume:
- 520
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 2668–2691
- Publication date:
- 2022-11-18
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-11-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1365-2966
- ISSN:
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0035-8711
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1308419
- Local pid:
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pubs:1308419
- Deposit date:
-
2023-02-06
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Hale et al
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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