The observations were carried out with a 30-m telescope of the Instituto
Argentino de Radioastronomıa during March 1996. The telescope was equipped
with a 1.42 GHz-continuum receiver of single beam, corrugated, dual-channel
feed. The bandwidth was 20 MHz and the system temperature K. The HPBW
of the antena is
arcminutes at the observing frequency. The
observations were made at night, in order to reduce the effects of changes in
telescope structure due to ambient temperature fluctuations and terrestrial
interfering signals, and intercalated in blanks during a variability monitoring
campaign of the radio source PKS 1830-211 (Romero et al.
1997).
A region of around the "best" position of 2EG
(see Thompson et al. 1995 and Mattox
et al. 1996) was mapped by means of repeated fast (
/min)
scans in declination, regularly spaced in right ascension. Each group of
scans were averaged and processed by standard techniques (e.g. Combi
& Romero 1995 and references therein). The non-variable, powerful
radio sources PKS 1814-63, PKS 1932-46, and PKS 2152-69 were observed
for flux density and pointing calibration. The resulting flux density scale
was fixed according to Wills (1975).
The result of these observations was the map shown (in galactic coordinates)
in Fig. 1 (click here). The rms noise of this map is mK. The strong
contamination produced by the radiation originated in the galactic plane
avoids a faithful discrimination of the fine radio features in this image.
With the aim of removing this difficulty we have applied a filtering method
originally developed by Sofue & Reich (1979) and used by
several authors in studies of regions close to the plane (e.g. Combi
et al. 1995; Duncan et al. 1995). The map shown in
Fig. 1 (click here) was convolved with a filtering Gaussian beam of HPBW
yielding brightness temperatures T01 and residuals
, where T stands for the original temperatures. A
new set of temperatures T'01 was computed according to
for
, and T'01=T for
. The procedure was repeated in order to generate T02,
, and T'02, and so on. After n=6 iterations,
when |T0n-T0n-1| became smaller than the rms noise, a residual
distribution
was obtained. The resulting final map,
where smooth emission with sizes scales larger than
has been
eliminated, is shown in Fig. 2 (click here). The original map can be recovered
just by simple addition of the background component to this new map.
Figure 1: Total continuum emission map at 1.42 GHz of the region
around the position of 2EG . Contour lines are shown at 8,
8.3, ..., 11.9 K in brightness temperature
Figure 2: The same region shown in Fig. 1 (click here) after
the subtraction of the diffuse disk contribution. The confidence contours
of the likelihood test statistics of 2EG are also shown as
a gray-scale. The contours of the radio emission are labelled in steps of
0.06, 0.16, ..., 0.96; 1.3, 1.6, and 1.9 K in brightness temperature. The
gray-scaled levels represent the 99%, 95%, 68%, and 50% statisitcal
probability that the source lies within each contour
Several radio sources can be clearly seen in the filtered image. Just two of
them have been previously detected: the gravitational lensed QSO PKS
1830-211 (Subrahmanyan et al. 1990) and the SNR (Green 1996). In Table 1 (click here) we list the main
characteristics of all sources in the frame.
Source | (l, b) | ![]() | ![]() |
![]() | Id |
G8.7-5 | (8.7, -4.9) | 0.51 | 1.6 | 0.1 | SNR |
G8.5-6.7 | (8.5, -6.7) | 0.36 | 1.9 | 0.21 | SNR? |
G10.2-3.5 | (10.2, -3.5) | 0.56 | 5.7 | -0.16 | SNR? |
G10.7-5.4 | (10.7, -5.4) | 0.81 | 17.7 | -0.71 | SNR |
G11.9-3.6 | (11.9, -3.6) | 0.34 | 1.1 | -0.75 | SNR |
PKS 1830-211 | (12.1, -5.7) | 1.88 | 11.8 | 0.12 | Lensed QSO |
G12.7-3.9 | (12.7, -3.9) | 0.36 | 1.9 | -0.56 | SNR |
In order to obtain some information about the nature of the new sources
discovered in the field, we have used data from the 408 MHz all-sky survey
by Haslam et al. (1982) for computing spectral indices of the
emission. These lower frequency data were processed in similar way than the
1.42 GHz data and, after the removing of the background radiation, a
spectral index distribution was calculated using the procedure described by
Combi & Romero (1995, 1997). The resulting spectral index map
is shown in Fig. 3 (click here), where contour values lower than 5 rms have
been excluded. The angular resolution of this map is arcminutes
due to the convolution of the 1.42-GHz beam to the larger 408-MHz beam.
Mean errors
have been estimated
as in Combi & Romero (1997). The accuracy of the given
spectral index values can be checked with PKS 1830-211, which is a
well-established flat-spectrum source (Pramesh Rao & Subrahmanyan 1988).
Figure 3: Spectral index distribution computed between 408 MHz and
1.42 GHz. The values of the spectral indices (defined as
) are indicated in the map