Radio galaxies in Las Campanas redshift survey

To increase the redshift range and look-back time over which the radio luminosity function can be measured directly, we identified 1157 galaxies in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS, Cat. <VII/203>) having isophotal (red) magnitudes m_ISO_<=18.0 with radio sources brighter than 2.5mJy/beam in the 1.4GHz NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS, 1998AJ....115.1693C). Since the NVSS has 45" FWHM angular resolution, these radio and optical limits include nearly all LCRS galaxies with 1.4GHz luminosities L>=10^22.4^W/Hz at z~0.05 to L>=10^23.6^W/Hz at z~0.2.

The mean redshift <z>~0.14 of the radio-detected galaxies is higher than the mean redshift <z>~0.10 of the optical sample. This indicates that, statistically, the radio emission was detected from galaxies with the highest optical luminosities. Of the 1157 galaxies, 261 were also identified with far-infrared (FIR) sources in the IRAS Point Source Catalog and Faint Source Catalog.