The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey: a catalogue of beam-sized sources in the Galactic longitude range 120°–140°

Abstract

The SCUBA-2 Ambitious Sky Survey (SASSy) is composed of shallow 850-μm imaging using the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Here we describe the extraction of a catalogue of beam-sized sources from a roughly 120 deg2 region of the Galactic plane mapped uniformly (to an rms level of about 40 mJy), covering longitude 120° < l < 140° and latitude |b| < 2|$_{.}^{\circ}$|9. We used a matched-filtering approach to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) in these noisy maps and tested the efficiency of our extraction procedure through estimates of the false discovery rate, as well as by adding artificial sources to the real images. The primary catalogue contains a total of 189 sources at 850 μm, down to an S/N threshold of approximately 4.6. Additionally, we list 136 sources detected down to S/N = 4.3, but recognize that as we go lower in S/N, the reliability of the catalogue rapidly diminishes. We perform follow-up observations of some of our lower significance sources through small targeted SCUBA-2 images and list 265 sources detected in these maps down to S/N = 5. This illustrates the real power of SASSy: inspecting the shallow maps for regions of 850-μm emission and then using deeper targeted images to efficiently find fainter sources. We also perform a comparison of the SASSy sources with the Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources and the IRAS Point Source Catalogue, to determine which sources discovered in this field might be new, and hence potentially cold regions at an early stage of star formation.