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Register a new userExploring the pattern of the Galactic HI foreground of GRBs with the ATCA
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The afterglow of a gamma ray burst (GRB) can give us valuable insight into the properties of its host galaxy. To correctly interpret the spectra of the afterglow we need to have a good understanding of the foreground interstellar medium (ISM) in our own Galaxy. The common practice to correct for the foreground is to use neutral hydrogen (HI) data from the Leiden/Argentina/Bonn (LAB) survey. However, the poor spatial resolution of the single dish data may have a significant effect on the derived column densities. To investigate this, we present new high-resolution HI observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) towards 4 GRBs. We combine the interferometric ATCA data with single dish data from the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS) and derive new Galactic HI column densities towards the GRBs. We use these new foreground column densities to fit the Swift XRT X-ray spectra and calculate new intrinsic hydrogen column density values for the GRB host galaxies. We find that the new ATCA data shows higher Galactic HI column densities compared to the previous single dish data, which results in lower intrinsic column densities for the hosts. We investigate the line of sight optical depth near the GRBs and find that it may not be negligible towards one of the GRBs, which indicates that the intrinsic hydrogen column density of its host galaxy may be even lower. In addition, we compare our results to column densities derived from far-infrared data and find a reasonable agreement with the HI data.
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We present a survey of atomic hydrogen HI) emission in the direction of the Galactic Center conducted with the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). The survey covers the area -5 deg < l < +5, -5 deg < b <+5 deg over the velocity range -309 < v_{LSR} < 349 km/s with a velocity resolution of 1 km/s. The ATCA data are supplemented with data from the Parkes Radio Telescope for sensitivity to all angular scales larger than the 145 arcsec angular resolution of the survey. The mean rms brightness temperature across the field is 0.7 K, except near (l,b)=(0 deg, 0 deg) where it increases to ~2 K. This survey complements the Southern Galactic Plane Survey to complete the continuous coverage of the inner Galactic plane in HI at ~2 arcmin resolution. Here we describe the observations and analysis of this Galactic Center survey and present the final data product. Features such as Banias Clump 2, the far 3 kiloparsec arm and small high velocity clumps are briefly described.
We present the first interferometric blind HI survey of the Fornax galaxy cluster, which covers an area of 15 deg$^2$ out to the cluster $R_{vir}$. The survey has a resolution of 67x95 and 6.6 km$s^{-1}$ with a 3$sigma$ sensitivity of N(HI)~2x10$^{19}$ cm$^{-2}$ and MHI 2x10$^7$ M$_odot$. We detect 16 galaxies out of 200 spectroscopically confirmed Fornax cluster members. The detections cover ~3 orders of magnitude in HI mass, from 8x10$^6$ to 1.5x10$^{10}$ M$_odot$. They avoid the central, virialised region of the cluster both on the sky and in projected phase-space, showing that they are recent arrivals and that, in Fornax, HI is lost within a crossing time, ~2 Gyr. Half of these galaxies exhibit a disturbed HI morphology, including several cases of asymmetries, tails, offsets between HI and optical centres, and a case of a truncated HI disc suggesting that they have been interacting within or on their way to Fornax. Our HI detections are HI-poorer and form stars at a lower rate than non-cluster galaxies in the same $M_star$ range. Low mass galaxies are more strongly affected throughout their infall towards the cluster. The MHI/$M_star$ ratio of Fornax galaxies is comparable to that in the Virgo cluster. At fixed $M_star$, our HI detections follow the non-cluster relation between MHI and the star formation rate, and we argue that this implies that so far they have lost their HI on a timescale $gtrsim$1-2 Gyr. Deeper inside the cluster HI removal is likely to proceed faster, as confirmed by a population of HI-undetected but H$_2$-detected star-forming galaxies. Based on ALMA data, we find a large scatter in H$_2$-to-HI mass ratio, with several galaxies showing an unusually high ratio that is probably caused by faster HI removal. We identify an HI-rich subgroup of possible interacting galaxies dominated by NGC 1365, where pre-processing is likey to have taken place.
A significant number of the parameters of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) and its host galaxy are calculated from the afterglow. There are various methods obtaining extinction values for the necessary correction for galactic foreground. These are: galaxy counts, from HI 21 cm surveys, from spectroscopic measurements and colors of nearby Galactic stars, or using extinction maps calculated from infrared surveys towards the GRB. We demonstrate that AKARI Far-Infrared Surveyor sky surface brightness maps are useful uncovering the fine structure of the galactic foreground of GRBs. Galactic cirrus structures of a number of GRBs are calculated with a 2 arcminute resolution, and the results are compared to that of other methods.
We present the first results from the Small Magellanic Cloud portion of a new Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) HI absorption survey of both of the Magellanic Clouds, comprising over 800 hours of observations. Our new HI absorption line data allow us to measure the temperature and fraction of cold neutral gas in a low metallicity environment. We observed 22 separate fields, targeting a total of 55 continuum sources against 37 of which we detected HI absorption; from this we measure a column density weighted mean average spin temperature of $<T_{s}>=150$ K. Splitting the spectra into individual absorption line features, we estimate the temperatures of different gas components and find an average cold gas temperature of $sim{30}$ K for this sample, lower than the average of $sim{40}$ K in the Milky Way. The HI appears to be evenly distributed throughout the SMC and we detect absorption in $67%$ of the lines of sight in our sample, including some outside the main body of the galaxy ($N_{text{HI}}>2times{10^{21}}$ cm$^{-2}$). The optical depth and temperature of the cold neutral atomic gas shows no strong trend with location spatially or in velocity. Despite the low metallicity environment, we find an average cold gas fraction of $sim{20%}$, not dissimilar from that of the Milky Way.
We compute the cross correlation of the intensity and polarisation from the 5-year WMAP data in different sky-regions with respect to template maps for synchrotron, dust, and free-free emission. We derive the frequency dependence and polarisation fraction for all three components in 48 different sky regions of HEALPix (Nside=2) pixelisation. The anomalous emission associated with dust is clearly detected in intensity over the entire sky at the K (23 GHz) and Ka (33 GHz) WMAP bands, and is found to be the dominant foreground at low Galactic latitude, between b=-40 and b=+10. The synchrotron spectral index obtained from the K and Ka WMAP bands from an all-sky analysis is -3.32pm 0.12 for intensity and -3.01pm0.03 for the polarised intensity. The polarisation fraction of the synchrotron is constant in frequency and increases with latitude from ~5% near the Galactic plane up to ~40% in some regions at high latitude; the average value for |b|<20 is 8.6pm1.7 (stat) pm0.5 (sys) % while for |b|>20 it is 19.3pm0.8 (stat) pm 0.5 (sys) %. Anomalous dust and free-free emission appear to be relatively unpolarised...[Abridged]...the average polarisation fraction of dust-correlated emission at K-band is 3.2pm0.9 (stat) pm 1.5 (sys) %, or less than 5% at 95% confidence. When comparing real data with simulations, 8 regions show a detected polarisation above the 99th percentile of the distribution from simulations with no input foreground polarisation, 6 of which are detected at above 2sigma and display polarisation fractions between 2.6% and 7.2%, except for one anomalous region, which has 32pm12%. The dust polarisation values are consistent with the expectation from spinning-dust emission, but polarised dust emission from magnetic-dipole radiation cannot be ruled out. Free-free emission was found to be unpolarised with an upper limit of 3.4% at 95% confidence.
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