A UNIFIED CATALOG OF RADIO OBJECTS DETECTED BY NVSS, FIRST, WENSS, GB6, AND SDSS

Abstract

We construct a catalog of radio sources detected by the Green Bank 6 cm survey GB6, Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm (FIRST) and NRAO VLA 1 Sky Survey (NVSS) (20 cm), and Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS) (92 cm) radio surveys, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) optical survey. The 2.7 million entries in the publicly-available master catalog are comprised of the closest three FIRST to NVSS matches (within 30'') and vice versa, and unmatched sources from each survey. Entries are supplemented by data from the other radio and optical surveys, where available. All objects with even a small probability of physical association are included, such that catalog users can easily implement their own selection criteria for data analysis. We perform data analysis in the ∼ 3000 deg 2 region of sky where the surveys overlap, which contains 140,000 NVSS–FIRST sources, of which 64,000 are detected by WENSS and 12,000 by GB6. About one third of each sample is detected by the SDSS. An automated classification method based on 20 cm fluxes defines three radio morphology classes: complex, resolved, and compact. Radio color–magnitude–morphology diagrams for these classes show structure suggestive of strong underlying physical correlations. Complex and resolved sources tend to have a steep spectral slope (α ∼ −0.8) that is nearly constant from 6 to 92 cm, while the compact class (unresolved on ∼5'' scale by FIRST) contains a significant number of flat-spectrum (α ∼ 0) sources. In the optically-detected sample, quasars dominate the flat-spectrum compact sources while steep-spectrum and resolved objects contain substantial numbers of both quasars and galaxies. Differential radio counts of quasars and galaxies are similar at bright flux levels (>100 mJy at 20 cm), while at fainter levels the quasar counts are significantly reduced below galaxy counts. The optically-undetected sample is strongly biased toward steep-spectrum sources. In samples of quasars and galaxies with SDSS spectra (2885 and 1288 respectively), we find that radio properties such as spectral slope, morphology, and radio loudness are correlated with optical color and luminosity.