The MURALES survey. II. Presentation of the observations and first results

Abstract

We present observations of a complete sub sample of 20 radio galaxies from the Third Cambridge Catalog (3C) with redshift <0.3 obtained from VLT/MUSE optical integral field spectroscoph. These data have been obtained as part of the MURALES survey (a MUse RAdio Loud Emission line Snapshot survey) with the main goal of exploring the AGN feedback process in a sizeable sample of the most powerful radio sources at low redshift. We present the data analysis and, for each source, the resulting emission line images and the 2D gas velocity field. Thanks to their unprecedented depth these observations reveal emission line structures extending to several tens of kiloparsec in most objects. The gas velocity often shows ordered rotation, but in many sources it is highly complex. 3C sources show a connection between radio morphology and emission line properties: while in three of the four FR Is the line emission regions are compact, ~ 1 kpc in size, in all but one of the FR IIs we detected large scale structures of ionized gas with a median extent of 17 kpc. Among the FR IIs, those of high and low excitation show extended gas structures with similar morphological properties, suggesting that they both inhabit regions characterized by a rich gaseous environment.