GASKAP-HI Pilot Survey Science I: ASKAP Zoom Observations of HI Emission in the Small Magellanic Cloud

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 in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.--Full list of authors: Pingel, N. M.; Dempsey, J.; McClure-Griffiths, N. M.; Dickey, J. M.; Jameson, K. E.; Arce, H.; Anglada, G.; Bland-Hawthorn, J.; Breen, S. L.; Buckland-Willis, F.; Clark, S. E.; Dawson, J. R.; Denes, H.; Di Teodoro, E. M.; For, B-Q; Foster, Tyler J.; Gomez, J. F.; Imai, H.; Joncas, G.; Kim, C-G; Lee, M-Y; Lynn, C.; Leahy, D.; Ma, Y. K.; Marchal, A.; McConnell, D.; Miville-Deschenes, M-A; Moss, V. A.; Murray, C. E.; Nidever, D.; Peek, J.; Staveley-Smith, L.; Tepper-Garcia, T.; Tremblay, C. D.; Uscanga, L.; van Loon, J. Th; Vazquez-Semadeni, E.; Allison, J. R.; Anderson, C. S.; Ball, Lewis; Bell, M.; Bock, D. C-J; Bunton, J.; Cooray, F. R.; Cornwell, T.; Koribalski, B. S.; Gupta, N.; Hayman, D. B.; Harvey-Smith, L.; Lee-Waddell, K.; Ng, A.; Phillips, C. J.; Voronkov, M.; Westmeier, T.; Whiting, M. T.; Stanimirovic, S.
We present the most sensitive and detailed view of the neutral hydrogen ( HI ) emission associated with the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), through the combination of data from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Parkes (Murriyang), as part of the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (GASKAP) pilot survey. These GASKAP-HI pilot observations, for the first time, reveal HI in the SMC on similar physical scales as other important tracers of the interstellar medium, such as molecular gas and dust. The resultant image cube possesses an rms noise level of 1.1 K ( 1.6mJy beam−1 ) per 0.98km s−1 spectral channel with an angular resolution of 30′′ ( ∼10pc ). We discuss the calibration scheme and the custom imaging pipeline that utilises a joint deconvolution approach, efficiently distributed across a computing cluster, to accurately recover the emission extending across the entire ∼25deg2 field-of-view. We provide an overview of the data products and characterise several aspects including the noise properties as a function of angular resolution and the represented spatial scales by deriving the global transfer function over the full spectral range. A preliminary spatial power spectrum analysis on individual spectral channels reveals that the power law nature of the density distribution extends down to scales of 10 pc. We highlight the scientific potential of these data by comparing the properties of an outflowing high-velocity cloud with previous ASKAP+Parkes HI test observations. c The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
The Australian SKA Pathfinder is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is managed by CSIRO. Operation of ASKAP is funded by the Australian Government with support from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. ASKAP uses the resources of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Establishment of ASKAP, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre are initiatives of the Australian Government, with support from the Government of Western Australia and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Pipeline development was tested on the OzSTAR supercomputer under the project code, oz145, which is available through Swinburne University’s Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through grant DP190101571. N.M.-G. acknowledges the support of the ARC through Future Fellowship FT150100024. G. A. and J. F. G. acknowledge support from the State Agency for Research (10.13039/501100011033) of the Spanish MCIU, through grants AYA2017-84390-C2-1-R and PID2020-114461GB-I00 (co-funded by FEDER) and the ‘Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa’ award for the Instituto de Astrofsica de Andaluca (SEV-2017-0709). C. E. M. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-1801471.