The galaxy power spectrum from TGSS ADR1 and the effect of flux calibration systematics

Abstract

We explore the large to moderate scale anisotropy in distant radio sources using the TGSS ADR1 catalog. We use different measures, i.e. number counts, sky brightness and flux per source, for this study. In agreement with earlier results, we report a significant excess of clustering signal above the angular scale of roughly $10$ degrees (i.e. $l⪅20-30$). We find that some survey areas have a systematically low/high flux and argue this may be the cause of the observed signal of excess power at low multipoles. With mocks we demonstrate the effect of such large scale flux systematics and recover TGSS like excess clustering signal by assuming $20\%$ flux uncertainties over $\sim 10^{\circ }\times 10^{\circ }$ size patches. We argue that that TGSS at this stage, i.e. TGSS ADR1, is not suitable for large scale clustering measurements. We find that the measure, flux per source, shows evidence of isotropy for all multipoles $l>2$ despite the presence of systematics in the data.

10 pages, 8 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ