Study of the Galactic radio sources in the SCORPIO survey resolved by ATCA at 2.1 GHz

Abstract

Abstract We present a catalogue of a large sample of extended radio sources in the SCORPIO field, observed and resolved by the Australia Telescope Compact Array. SCORPIO, a pathfinder project for addressing the early operations of the Australia SKA Pathfinder, is a survey of ∼5 square degrees between 1.4 and 3.1 GHz, centered at l = 343.5○, b = 0.75○ and with an angular resolution of about 10 arcsec. It is aimed at understanding the scientific and technical challenges to be faced by future Galactic surveys. With a mean sensitivity around $100\ \mu \mathrm{Jy\ beam}^{-1}$ and the possibility to recover angular scales at least up to 4 arcmin, we extracted 99 extended sources, 35 of them detected for the first time. Among the 64 known sources 55 had at least a tentative classification in literature. Studying the radio morphology and comparing the radio emission with infrared we propose as candidates 6 new H ii regions, 2 new planetary nebulae, 2 new luminous blue variable or Wolf–Rayet stars and 3 new supernova remnants. This study provides an overview of the potentiality of future radio surveys in terms of Galactic source extraction and characterization and a discussion on the difficulty to reduce and analyze interferometric data on the Galactic plane.