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Detecting galaxies in a large H i spectral cube

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Abstract

The upcoming square kilometer array (SKA) is expected to produce humongous amount of data for undertaking H i science. We have developed an MPI-based Python pipeline to deal with the large data efficiently with the present computational resources. Our pipeline divides such large H i 21-cm spectral cubes into several small cubelets, and then processes them in parallel using publicly available H i source finder SoFiA-2. The pipeline also takes care of sources at the boundaries of the cubelets and also filters out false and redundant detections. By comapring with the true source catalog, we find that the detection efficiency depends on the SoFiA-2 parameters, such as the smoothing kernel size, linking length and threshold values. We find the optimal kernel size for all flux bins to be between 3–5 and 7–15 pixels, respectively, in the spatial and frequency directions. Comparing the recovered source parameters with the original values, we find that the output of SoFiA-2 is highly dependent on kernel sizes and a single choice of kernel is not sufficient for all types of H i galaxies. We also propose the use of alternative methods to SoFiA-2, which can be used in our pipeline to find sources more robustly.

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Notes

  1. https://sdc2.astronomers.skatelescope.org/.

  2. 1 TB cube was restricted only to the participants through some private computational facilities.

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to acknowledge SKA India Consortium and IUCAA for the support with the computing facilities. We would also like to thank Nirupam Roy for useful discussions. We acknowledge National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) for providing computing resources of ‘PARAM Shakti’ at IIT Kharagpur, which is implemented by C-DAC and supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. We also acknowledge Raman Research Institute for providing their HPC facility. RM is supported by the Wenner-Gren Post-doctoral Fellowship. AKS acknowledges support by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 255/18). AM acknowledges Indian Institute of Technology Indore, for supporting the research through Teaching Assistantship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India

    Abinash Kumar Shaw

  2. Astrophysics Research Centre, Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, 4353701, Israel

    Abinash Kumar Shaw

  3. Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, PES University, Bangalore, 560085, India

    Manoj Jagannath

  4. Department of Astronomy, Astrophysics & Space Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore, 453552, India

    Aishrila Mazumder & Narendra Nath Patra

  5. Department of Physics and McGill Space Institute, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 2T8, QC, Canada

    Arnab Chakraborty

  6. Astronomy and Astrophysics Division, Raman Research Institute, Sadashivanagar, Bengaluru, 560080, India

    Narendra Nath Patra

  7. Department of Astronomy and Oskar Klein Centre, AlbaNova, Stockholm University, Stockholm, SE-10691, Sweden

    Rajesh Mondal

  8. Department of Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel

    Rajesh Mondal

  9. School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Samir Choudhuri

  10. Department of Physics, Indain Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, 600036, India

    Samir Choudhuri

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  1. Abinash Kumar Shaw
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  2. Manoj Jagannath
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  3. Aishrila Mazumder
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Correspondence to Abinash Kumar Shaw.

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This article is part of the Special Issue on “Indian Participation in the SKA”.

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Shaw, A.K., Jagannath, M., Mazumder, A. et al. Detecting galaxies in a large H i spectral cube. J Astrophys Astron 43, 99 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-022-09880-1

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