The MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey Data Release 2: Wideband continuum catalogues and a measurement of the cosmic radio dipole

We present the second data release of the MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS), consisting of wideband continuum catalogues of 391 pointings observed at L~band. The full wideband catalogue covers 4344 deg$^2$ of sky, reaches a depth of 10 $\mu$Jy beam$^{-1}$, and contains 971,980 sources. With its balance between survey depth and sky coverage, MALS DR2 covers five orders of magnitude of flux density, presenting a robust view of the extragalactic radio source population down to 200 $\mu$Jy. Using this catalogue, we perform a measurement of the cosmic radio dipole, an anisotropy in the number counts of radio sources with respect to the cosmic background, analogous to the dipole found in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). For this measurement, we present the characterisation of completeness and noise properties of the catalogue, and show that a declination-dependent systematic affects the number density of faint sources. In the dipole measurement on the MALS catalogue, we recover reasonable dipole measurements once we model the declination systematic with a linear fit between the size of the major axis of the restoring beam and the amount of sources of each pointing. The final results are consistent with the CMB dipole in terms of direction and amplitude, unlike many recent measurements of the cosmic radio dipole made with other centimetre wavelength catalogues, which generally show a significantly larger amplitude. This result demonstrates the value of dipole measurements with deeper and more sparse radio surveys, as the population of faint sources probed may have had a significant impact on the measured dipole.
Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The MALS wideband catalogues and images are publicly available at https://mals.iucaa.in