We report the discovery of extended radio emission in the Phoenix cluster (SPT-CL J2344-4243, z=0.596) with the GMRT at 610 MHz. The diffuse emission extends over a region of at least 400-500 kpc and surrounds the central radio source of the Brightes
t Cluster Galaxy, but does not appear to be directly associated with it. We classify the diffuse emission as a radio mini-halo, making it the currently most distant mini-halo known. Radio mini-halos have been explained by synchrotron emitting particles re-accelerated via turbulence, possibly induced by gas sloshing generated from a minor merger event. Chandra observations show a non-concentric X-ray surface brightness distribution, which is consistent with this sloshing interpretation. The mini-halo has a flux density of $17pm5$ mJy, resulting in a 1.4 GHz radio power of ($10.4pm3.5) times 10^{24}$ W Hz$^{-1}$. The combined cluster emission, which includes the central compact radio source, is also detected in a shallow GMRT 156 MHz observation and together with the 610 MHz data we compute a spectral index of $-0.84pm0.12$ for the overall cluster radio emission. Given that mini-halos typically have steeper radio spectra than cluster radio galaxies, this spectral index should be taken as an upper limit for the mini-halo.
High-resolution astronomical imaging at sub-GHz radio frequencies has been available for more than 15 years, with the VLA at 74 and 330 MHz, and the GMRT at 150, 240, 330 and 610 MHz. Recent developments include wide-bandwidth upgrades for VLA and GM
RT, and commissioning of the aperture-array-based, multi-beam telescope LOFAR. A common feature of these telescopes is the necessity to deconvolve the very many detectable sources within their wide fields-of-view and beyond. This is complicated by gain variations in the radio signal path that depend on viewing direction. One such example is phase errors due to the ionosphere. Here I discuss the inner workings of SPAM, a set of AIPS-based data reduction scripts in Python that includes direction-dependent calibration and imaging. Since its first version in 2008, SPAM has been applied to many GMRT data sets at various frequencies. Many valuable lessons were learned, and translated into various SPAM software modifications. Nowadays, semi-automated SPAM data reduction recipes can be applied to almost any GMRT data set, yielding good quality continuum images comparable with (or often better than) hand-reduced results. SPAM is currently being migrated from AIPS to CASA with an extension to handle wide bandwidths. This is aimed at providing users of the VLA low-band system and the upcoming wide-bandwidth GMRT with the necessary data reduction tools.
We have used a relatively long, contiguous VHF observation of a bright cosmic radio source (Cygnus A) with the Very Large Array (VLA) to demonstrate the capability of this instrument to study the ionosphere. This interferometer, and others like it, c
an observe ionospheric total electron content (TEC) fluctuations on a much wider range of scales than is possible with many other instruments. We have shown that with a bright source, the VLA can measure differential TEC values between pairs of antennas (delta-TEC) with an precision of 0.0003 TECU. Here, we detail the data reduction and processing techniques used to achieve this level of precision. In addition, we demonstrate techniques for exploiting these high-precision delta-TEC measurements to compute the TEC gradient observed by the array as well as small-scale fluctuations within the TEC gradient surface. A companion paper details specialized spectral analysis techniques used to characterize the properties of wave-like fluctuations within this data.
We analyzed new 237 MHz and 614 MHz GMRT data of the most X-ray luminous galaxy cluster, RX J1347-1145. Our radio results are compared with the MUSTANG 90 GHz Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect map and with re-processed Chandra and XMM-Newton archival data of
this cluster. We point out for the first time in an unambiguous way the correspondence between a radio excess in a diffuse intra-cluster radio source and a hot region detected through both Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and X-ray observations. Our result indicates that electron re-acceleration in the excess emission of the radio mini-halo at the center of RX J1347-1145 is most likely related to a shock front propagating into the intra-cluster medium.
