A Quick Look at the 3GHz radio sky. II. DRAGNs

This multicomponent morphology unfortunately creates difficulties for source finders, leading to components that are (a) separate parts of a wider whole, and (b) offset from the multiwavelength cross identification of the host galaxy. In this work we define an algorithm, DRAGNhunter, for identifying double radio sources associated with AGNs (DRAGNs) from component catalog data in the first epoch Quick Look images of the high-resolution (~3" beam size) Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS).

We use DRAGNhunter to construct a catalog of >17000 DRAGNs in VLASS for which contamination from spurious sources is estimated at ~11%. A "high-fidelity" sample consisting of 90% of our catalog is identified for which contamination is <3%. Host galaxies are found for ~13000 DRAGNs as well as for an additional 234,000 single-component radio sources.