A Search for Giant Radio Galaxy Candidates and Their Radio-Optical Follow-up

TLDR: In this article, a computer algorithm was designed to identify contiguous emission regions, large and elongated enough to serve as GRG candidates, and applied it to the entire 1.4GHz NRAO VLA Sky survey (NVSS) image atlas.

Abstract: We present results of a search for giant radio galaxies (GRGs) larger than 1 Mpc in projected size. We designed a computer algorithm to identify contiguous emission regions, large and elongated enough to serve as GRG candidates, and applied it to the entire 1.4-GHz NRAO VLA Sky survey (NVSS) image atlas. Subsequent visual inspection of 1,000 such regions revealed 15 new GRGs, as well as many other candidate GRGs, some of them previously reported, for which no redshift was known. Our optical spectroscopy of 25 host galaxies with two 2.1-m telescopes in Mexico, and four others with the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), yielded another 24 GRGs. We also obtained higher-resolution radio images with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array for some unconfirmed GRG candidates.