The Phoenix survey: the pairing fraction of faint radio sources

Abstract

The significance of tidal interactions in the evolution of the faint radio population (sub-mJy) is studied using a deep and homogeneous radio survey (1.4 GHz), covering an area of 3.14 deg${}^2$ and complete to a flux density of 0.4 mJy. Optical photometric and spectroscopic data are also available for this sample. A statistical approach is employed to identify candidate physical associations between radio sources and optically selected `field' galaxies. We find an excess of close pairs around optically identified faint radio sources, albeit at a low significance level, implying that the pairing fraction of the sub-mJy radio sources is similar to that of `field' galaxies (at the same magnitude limit) but higher than that of local galaxies.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

References in corpus (5)

• Pure Luminosity Evolution models for faint field galaxy samples
• The X-ray Evolution of Merging Galaxies
• The Phoenix survey: optical and near-infrared observations of faint radio sources
• Optical identifications and spectroscopy of a faint radio source sample: the nature of the sub-mJy population
• The Clustering of K\sim 20 Galaxies on 17 Radio Galaxy Fields

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Phoenix Deep Survey: The 1.4 GHz microJansky catalogue
• The Diversity of Extremely Red Objects
• The Phoenix Deep Survey: Optical and near infrared imaging catalogs
• Optical identifications of $\sim 4000$ radio sources at the 1 mJy level