{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-rapid-askap-continuum-survey-iii-spectra","title":"The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey III: Spectra and Polarisation In Cutouts of Extragalactic Sources (SPICE-RACS) First Data Release","arxiv_id":"2307.07207","date":"2023-07-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alec J. M. Thomson","David McConnell","Emil Lenc","Timothy J Galvin","Lawrence Rudnick","George Heald","Catherine L. Hale","Stefan W. Duchesne","Craig S. Anderson","Ettore Carretti","Christoph Federrath","B. M. Gaensler","Lisa Harvey-Smith","Marijke Haverkorn","Aidan W. Hotan","Yik Ki Ma","Tara Murphy","N. M. McClure-Griffith","Vanessa A. Moss","Shane P. O'Sullivan","Wasim Raja","Amit Seta","Cameron L. Van Eck","Jennifer L. West","Matthew T. Whiting","Mark H. Wieringa"],"abstract":"The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope has carried out a survey of the entire Southern Sky at 887.5MHz. The wide area, high angular resolution, and broad bandwidth provided by the low-band Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS-low) allow the production of a next-generation rotation measure (RM) grid across the entire Southern Sky. Here we introduce this project as Spectral and Polarisation in Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS (SPICE-RACS). In our first data release, we image 30 RACS-low fields in Stokes $I$, $Q$, $U$ at 25'' angular resolution, across 744 to 1032MHz with 1MHz spectral resolution. Using a bespoke, highly parallelised, software pipeline we are able to rapidly process wide-area spectro-polarimetric ASKAP observations. Notably, we use 'postage stamp' cutouts to assess the polarisation properties of \\ncomponents\\ radio components detected in total intensity. We find that our Stokes $Q$ and $U$ images have an rms noise of ~80$\\mu$Jy/PSF, and our correction for instrumental polarisation leakage allows us to characterise components with >1% polarisation fraction over most of the field of view. We produce a broadband polarised radio component catalogue that contains \\nrms\\ RM measurements over an area of ~1300deg^2 with an average error in RM of 1.6+1.1-1.0rad/m^2, and an average linear polarisation fraction 3.4+3.0-1.6%. We determine this subset of components using the conditions that the polarised signal-to-noise ratio is $>8$, the polarisation fraction is above our estimated polarised leakage, and the Stokes $I$ spectrum has a reliable model. Our catalogue provides an areal density of $4\\pm2$ RMs/deg^2; an increase of $\\sim4$ times over the previous state-of-the-art (Taylor et al. 2009). Meaning that, having used just 3% of the RACS-low sky area, we have produced the 3rd largest RM catalogue to date. This catalogue has broad applications for studying...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07207v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07207v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-rapid-askap-continuum-survey-iii-spectra","repo_url":"https://github.com/alecthomson/arrakis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}