Chapter 27: Deja vu All Over Again: Using NVO Tools to Re-Investigate a Complete Sample of Texas Radio Survey Sources


Paper:	Chapter 27: Deja vu All Over Again: Using NVO Tools to Re-Investigate a Complete Sample of Texas Radio Survey Sources
Volume:	382, The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research
Page:	283
Authors:	Lucas, R.A.; Rohde, D.; Tamura, T.; Van Duyne, J.
Abstract:	At the first NVO Summer School in September 2004, a complete sample of Texas Radio Survey sources, first derived in 1989 and subsequently observed with the VLA in A-array snapshot mode in 1990, was revisited. The original investigators had never had the occasion to reduce the A-array 5-minute snapshot data, nor to do any other significant follow-up, though the sample still seemed a possibly useful but relatively small study of radio galaxies, AGN, quasars, extragalactic sources, and galaxy clusters, etc. At the time of the original sample definition in late 1989, the best optical material available for the region was the SRC-J plate from the UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia. In much more recent times, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has included the region in its DR2 data release, so good multicolor optical imaging in a number of standard bandpasses has finally become available. These data, along with other material in the radio, infrared, and (where available) were used to get a better preliminary idea of the nature of the objects in the 1989 sample. We also investigated one of the original questions: whether these radio sources with steeper (or at least non-flat) radio spectra were associated with galaxy clusters, and in some cases higher-redshift galaxy clusters and AGN. A rudimentary web service was created which allowed the user to perform simple cone searches and SIAP image extractions of specified field sizes for multiwavelength data across the electromagnetic spectrum, and a prototype web page was set up which would display the resulting images in wavelength order across the page for sources in the sample. Finally, as an additional investigation, using radio and X-ray IDs as a proxy for AGN which might be associated with large, central cluster galaxies, positional matches of radio and X-ray sources from two much larger catalogs were done using the tool TOPCAT in order to search for the degree of correlation between ID positions, radio luminosity, and cluster ID positions. It was hoped that cross-correlated matches could possibly give some clue to the relationship of these radio sources to galaxy clusters. These preliminary results need more in-depth investigation and are currently being pursued via a NVO grant to the first author. The original VLA 5-minute A-array snapshots have also now been reduced and are complementary in nature to the VLA FIRST data. It is planned to eventually make these reduced VLA A-array data publicas part of a web service via the NVO facilities along with a table of multiwavelength properties for the sources in VOTable format.