Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series
The Journey to a More Comprehensive Catalog of Compact Symmetric Objects
Presented by Evan Sheldahl (UNM)
Compact symmetric objects (CSOs) are a type of young radio source less than 1 kpc in size with symmetrical jet emission. They are important to study because they may have the ability to strongly affect the evolution of their host galaxies, influencing the formation of powerful radio sources. However, they are often confused for compact steep spectrum (CSS) and gigahertz-peaked spectrum (GPS) sources in the literature due to their similarities with these types of sources and the ease of classifying them by spectra rather than morphology. In my talk, I will describe my efforts with the CSOcat team to develop a more comprehensive catalog of CSOs. We have looked through the literature and identified many potential CSOs. To obtain additional evidence with which to classify more ambiguous sources, we observed many of these candidates using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and Very Large Array (VLA). The VLBA observations give us a peek into the complex smaller scale structure of the sources while the VLA observations let us inspect larger scale emission across a much larger frequency range. In addition, since CSOs generally possess the ideal properties of phase calibrators at arcsecond scales, this information can be included in the VLA calibrator manual to help future VLA users.
2:00 pm, Thursday, April 21, 2022
PAIS-3205, PAIS
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