An Exploration of In-band Spectral Index Techniques for Extended Radio Sources with EMU

Abstract Spectral indices are an effective way of differentiating between thermal and nonthermal sources of radio emission. Most often, spectral indices are determined using flux measurements taken over multiple observations with different instruments. Since these data are not always available, determining spectral indices from a single telescope observation is desirable. The reliability of these in-band spectral indices has not been well studied, particularly for extended sources. Here, we explore three different techniques for finding in-band spectral indices with the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU), a radio southern sky survey being conducted with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). These methods include: (1) integrating fluxes in sub-bands, (2) temperature–temperature (T–T) plots, and (3) using the ratio of the Taylor terms produced in the imaging process. We apply these techniques to a selection of extended sources of radio emission, primarily supernova remnants (SNRs) and H ii regions, and assess if the indices produced through these methods agree with the expected values. For the SNRs, we also compare the in-band results to broadband spectral indices determined using flux values obtained from published works. We examine whether and when the in-band techniques can differentiate between thermal and nonthermal sources. In general, we find the T–T plot method to be the most reliable across the range of source sizes and brightnesses studied for both SNRs and H ii regions. The sub-band and Taylor term methods can be useful under certain conditions but cannot be considered as broadly reliable for extended sources.