Pushing the frontiers of low-frequency radio astronomy: An ultra-deep sub-arcsecond LOFAR image of ELAIS-N1

Abstract

We present ultra-deep sub-arcsecond radio images of the ELAIS-N1 field covering 2.5x2.5 deg^2, produced from 200 hours of LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) observations in the 115-168 MHz band. The radio continuum images are obtained using recent advances in LOFAR long-baseline calibration and imaging. We achieve a central point-source sensitivity of 5.3 $μ$Jy/beam at an angular resolution of 0.33"x0.39" and an area-weighted sensitivity of 7.4 $μ$Jy/beam at 0.36"x0.45", making these the deepest radio images below 1.28 GHz to date and among the deepest at any radio frequency. By combining our data with previously released deep 6" LOFAR images, we compile a catalogue with a total of 62,916 unique radio sources across 2.5x2.5 deg^2. Our calibration strategy, combined with astrometric alignment using 95 Gaia quasars, results in positional offsets of $Δ$RA = -3 $\pm$ 27 mas and $Δ$DEC = 2 $\pm$ 17 mas for these same sources. We further demonstrate the potential for deep polarisation studies at sub-arcsecond resolution with instrumental leakages from Stokes I into linear polarisation down to 0.12%, which is about a factor of two better than the typical leakage in the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey at 6" resolution. Our results demonstrate that imaging a large number of observations over a wide field area at sub-arcsecond resolution is now computationally feasible. This establishes a new benchmark for low-frequency radio imaging in terms of combining depth, resolution, and survey area, which lays the foundation for deeper and wider surveys in the LOFAR2.0 and SKA era.