The high-frequency radio sky, like the gamma-ray sky surveyed by the Fermi satellite, is dominated by flat spectrum radio quasars and BL Lac objects at bright flux levels. To investigate the relationship between radio and gamma-ray emission in extragalactic sources, we have cross-matched the Australia Telescope 20 GHz survey catalog (AT20G) with the Fermi-LAT 1 year Point Source Catalog (1FGL). The 6.0sr of sky covered by both catalogs (DEC<0{deg},|b|>1.5{deg}) contains 5890 AT20G radio sources and 604 1FGL gamma-ray sources. The AT20G source positions are accurate to within ~1 arcsec and, after excluding known Galactic sources, 43% of Fermi 1FGL sources have an AT20G source within the 95% Fermi confidence ellipse. Monte Carlo tests imply that at least 95% of these matches are genuine associations. Only five gamma-ray sources (1% of the Fermi catalog) have more than one AT20G counterpart in the Fermi error box. The AT20G matches also generally support the active galactic nucleus (AGN) associations in the First LAT AGN Catalog. We find a trend of increasing gamma-ray flux density with 20GHz radio flux density. The Fermi detection rate of AT20G sources is close to 100% for the brightest 20GHz sources, decreasing to 20% at 1Jy, and to roughly 1% at 100mJy. Eight of the matched AT20G sources have no association listed in 1FGL and are presented here as potential gamma-ray AGNs for the first time. We also identify an alternative AGN counterpart to one 1FGL source. The percentage of Fermi sources with AT20G detections decreases toward the Galactic plane, suggesting that the 1FGL catalog contains at least 50 Galactic gamma-ray sources in the southern hemisphere that are yet to be identified.
The FIRST radio survey provides a new resource for constructing a large quasar sample. With source positions accurate to better than 1" and a point source sensitivity limit of 1mJy, it reaches 50 times deeper than previous radio catalogs. We report here on the results of the pilot phase for a FIRST Bright Quasar Survey (FBQS). Based on matching the radio catalog from the initial 300{deg}^2^ of FIRST coverage with the optical catalog from the Automated Plate Machine (APM) digitization of Palomar Sky Survey plates, we have defined a sample of 219 quasar candidates brighter than E=17.50. We have obtained optical spectroscopy for 151 of these and classified 25 others from the literature, yielding 69 quasars or Seyfert 1 galaxies, of which 51 are new identifications. The brightest new quasar has an E magnitude of 14.6 and z=0.91; four others are brighter than E=16. The redshifts range from z=0.12 to 3.42. Half of the detected objects are radio quiet with L_21-cm_<10^32.5^ergs/s. We use the results of this pilot survey to establish criteria for the FBQS that will produce a quasar search program which will be 70% efficient and 95% complete to a 21-cm flux density limit of 1.0mJy.
We have used the Very Large Array (VLA) FIRST survey and the Automated Plate Measuring Facility (APM) catalog of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey I (POSS-I) plates as the basis for constructing a new radio-selected sample of optically bright quasars. This is the first radio-selected sample that is competitive in size with current optically selected quasar surveys. Using only two basic criteria, radio-optical positional coincidence and optical morphology, quasars and BL Lac objects can be identified with 60% selection efficiency; the efficiency increases to 70% for objects fainter than 17 mag. We show that a more sophisticated selection scheme can predict with better than 85% reliability which candidates will turn out to be quasars. This paper presents the second installment of the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey (FBQS), with a catalog of 636 quasars distributed over 2682 deg^2^. The quasar sample is characterized and all spectra are displayed.
We present the results of an extension of the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey (FBQS) to the South Galactic cap, and to a fainter optical magnitude limit. Radio source counterparts with SERC R magnitudes brighter than 18.9 which meet the other FBQS criteria are included. We supplement this list with a modest number of additional objects to test our completeness for quasars with extended radio morphologies. The survey covers 589deg^2^ in two equatorial strips in the southern cap. We have obtained spectra for 86% of the 522 candidates and find 321 radio-selected quasars of which 264 are reported here for the first time. A comparison of this fainter sample with the FBQS sample shows the two to be generally similar. Fourteen new broad absorption line (BAL) quasars are included in this sample. When combined with the previously identified BAL quasars in our earlier papers, we can discern a break in the frequency of BAL quasars with radio loudness, namely that the relative number of high-ionization BAL quasars drops by a factor of 4 for quasars with a radio-loudness parameter R*>100.
We present results on a survey to find extremely dust-reddened Type 1 quasars. Combining the FIRST radio survey, the 2MASS Infrared Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we have selected a candidate list of 122 potential red quasars. With more than 80% spectroscopically identified objects, well over 50% are classified as dust-reddened Type 1 quasars, whose reddenings (E(B-V)) range from approximately 0.1 to 1.5mag. They lie well off the color selection windows usually used to detect quasars and many fall within the stellar locus, which would have made it impossible to find these objects with traditional color selection techniques. The reddenings found are much more consistent with obscuration happening in the host galaxy rather than stemming from the dust torus. We find an unusually high fraction of broad absorption line (BAL) quasars at high redshift, all but one of them belonging to the low-ionization BAL (LoBAL) class and many also showing absorption in the metastable FeII line (FeLoBAL). The discovery of further examples of dust-reddened LoBAL quasars provides more support for the hypothesis that BAL quasars (at least LoBAL quasars) represent an early stage in the lifetime of the quasar. The fact that we see such a high fraction of BALs could indicate that the quasar is in a young phase in which quasar feedback from the BAL winds is suppressing star formation in the host galaxy.
The Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) began in 1993. It uses the VLA (Very Large Array, a facility of the National Radio Observatory (NRAO)) at a frequency of 1.4GHz, and it is slated to 10,000 deg^2^ of the North and South Galactic Caps, to a sensitivity of about 1mJy with an angular resolution of about 5". The images produced by an automated mapping pipeline have pixels of 1.8arcsec, a typical rms of 0.15mJy, and a resolution of 5arcsec; the images are available on the Internet (see the FIRST home page at http://sundog.stsci.edu/ for details). The source catalogue is derived from the images. This version (2003 Apr 11) of the FIRST Survey is derived from the data taken from 1993 through September 2002, and contains about 811,000 sources covering 8422 square degrees in the North Galactic cap and 611 square degrees in the South Galactic cap. The FIRST survey is now substantially complete; the planned additions include a version with improved sidelobe flagging and deeper observations of the southern equatorial strip (with variability information), and maybe a small amount of additional data to fill holes within the surveyed area.
The Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) began in 1993. It uses the VLA (Very Large Array, a facility of the National Radio Observatory (NRAO)) at a frequency of 1.4GHz, and it is slated to 10,000 deg^2^ of the North and South Galactic Caps, to a sensitivity of about 1mJy with an angular resolution of about 5''. The images produced by an automated mapping pipeline have pixels of 1.8'', a typical rms of 0.15mJy, and a resolution of 5''; the images are available on the Internet (see the FIRST home page at http://sundog.stsci.edu/ for details). The source catalogue is derived from the images. This catalog from the 1993 through 2011 observations contains 946,432 sources from the north and south Galactic caps. It covers a total of 10,575 square degrees of the sky (8444 square degrees in the north and 2131 square degrees in the south). In this version of the catalog, images taken in the the new EVLA configuration have been re-reduced using shallower CLEAN thresholds in order to reduce the "CLEAN bias" in those images. Also, the EVLA images are not co-added with older VLA images to avoid problems resulting from the different frequencies and noise properties of the configurations. That leads to small gaps in the sky coverage at boundaries between the EVLA and VLA regions. As a result, the area covered by this release of the catalog is about 60 square degrees smaller than the earlier release of the catalog (13Jun05, also available here as the "first13.dat" file), and the total number of sources is reduced by nearly 25,000. The previous version of the catalog does have sources in the overlap regions, but their flux densities are considered unreliable due to calibration errors. The flux densities should be more accurate in this catalog, biases are smaller, and the incidence of spurious sources is also reduced. Over most of the survey area, the detection limit is 1 mJy. A region along the equatorial strip (RA=21.3 to 3.3hr, Dec=-1 to 1deg) has a deeper detection threshold because two epochs of observation were combined. The typical detection threshold in this region is 0.75mJy. There are approximately 4,500 sources below the 1mJy threshold used for most previous versions of the catalog. The previous versions http://sundog.stsci.edu/first/catalogs/
The Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) began in 1993. It uses the VLA (Very Large Array, a facility of the National Radio Observatory (NRAO)) at a frequency of 1.4GHz, and it is slated to 10,000 deg^2^ of the North and South Galactic Caps, to a sensitivity of about 1mJy with an angular resolution of about 5''. The images produced by an automated mapping pipeline have pixels of 1.8'', a typical rms of 0.15mJy, and a resolution of 5''; the images are available on the Internet (see the FIRST home page at http://sundog.stsci.edu/ for details). The source catalogue is derived from the images. This catalog from the 1993 through 2011 observations contains 946,464 sources from the north and south Galactic caps. It covers a total of 10,635 square degrees of the sky (8444 square degrees in the north and 2191 square degrees in the south.) The catalog format differs from the previous version: The contents of the sidelobe flag column has changed to a sidelobe probability estimate, and columns have been added with information on optical and infrared counterparts from the SDSS and 2MASS catalogs. There is no GSC2 information in this version.
The FIRST survey to produce Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters began in 1993. It uses the VLA (Very Large Array, a facility of the National Radio Observatory (NRAO)) at a frequency of 1.4GHz, and it is slated to 10,000 deg^2^ to a sensitivity of about 1mJy with an angular resolution of about 5". The co-added images are available on the Internet (see the FIRST home page at http://sundog.stsci.edu/ for details). The source catalogue is derived from the images. This version of the FIRST Survey is derived from the 1993 through 1998 observations, and contains 549,707 sources covering the north and south Galactic caps. The catalog covers about a total of 6060 square degrees of sky (5450 square degrees in the north and 610 square degrees in the south). No new data were taken for the south Galactic cap from the preceding version (catalog <VIII/51>), but the southern images south of about -2 degrees were reprocessed with an improved pipeline script that substantially reduces the sidelobe levels in a small fraction of the fields. Consequently, many of the southern sources have slight changes in their positions, flux densities, and other properties; a small number of sources from the previous catalog are missing from this catalog.
We present a wide-field, subarcminute-resolution VLA image of the Galactic center region at 330MHz. With a resolution of ~7"x12" and an rms noise of 1.6mJy/beam, this image represents a significant increase in resolution and sensitivity over the previously published VLA image at this frequency. The improved sensitivity has more than tripled the census of small-diameter sources in the region, has resulted in the detection of two new nonthermal filaments (NTFs), 18 NTF candidates, and 30 pulsar candidates, reveals previously known extended sources in greater detail, and has resulted in the first detection of Sagittarius A* in this frequency range.
