Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-vmslq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-22T06:20:25.339Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
Accepted manuscript

Quantifying Radio Source Morphology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2025

Lachlan J. Barnes*
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 12 Wally’s Walk, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
Andrew M. Hopkins
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 12 Wally’s Walk, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
Lawrence Rudnick
Affiliation:
Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, 116 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Heinz Andernach
Affiliation:
Depto. de Astronomía, DCNE, Univ. de Guanajuato, Callejón de Jalisco s/n, Guanajuato, CP 36023, GTO, Mexico
Michael Cowley
Affiliation:
School of Chemistry & Physics, Faculty of Science, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia University of Southern Queensland, Centre for Astrophysics, West Street, Toowoomba QLD 4350, Australia
Nikhel Gupta
Affiliation:
CSIRO Space & Astronomy, Bentley, WA, Australia
Ray P. Norris
Affiliation:
ATNF, CSIRO Space & Astronomy, P.O. Box 76, Epping, NSW 1710, Australia Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia
Stanislav S. Shabala
Affiliation:
School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 37, Hobart, TAS 7001, Australia
Tayyaba Zafar
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 12 Wally’s Walk, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
*
Author for correspondence: Lachlan Barnes, Email: lachlan.barnes3@hdr.mq.edu.au.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The advent of next-generation telescope facilities brings with it an unprecedented amount of data, and the demand for effective tools to process and classify this information has become increasingly important. This work proposes a novel approach to quantify the radio galaxy morphology, through the development of a series of algorithmic metrics that can quantitatively describe the structure of radio source, and can be applied to radio images in an automatic way. These metrics are intuitive in nature and are inspired by the intrinsic structural differences observed between the existing Fanaroff-Riley (FR) morphology types. The metrics are defined in categories of asymmetry, blurriness, concentration, disorder, and elongation (ABCDE/single-lobe metrics), as well as the asymmetry and angle between lobes (source metrics). We apply these metrics to a sample of 480 sources from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe Pilot Survey (EMU-PS) and 72 well resolved extensively studied sources from An Atlas of DRAGNs, a subset of the revised Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources (3CRR).We find that these metrics are relatively robust to resolution changes, independent of each other, and measure fundamentally different structural components of radio galaxy lobes. These metrics work particularly well for sources with reasonable signal-to-noise and well separated lobes. We also find that we can recover the original FR classification using probabilistic combinations of our metrics, highlighting the usefulness of our approach for future large data sets from radio sky surveys.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Astronomical Society of Australia