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4. Comparison of the Green Bank and VLA source properties

Figure 1 (click here) shows that 82% of the sources are within tex2html_wrap_inline177850tex2html_wrap_inline1780 of the expected GB96 position and the distribution peaks at an offset of tex2html_wrap_inline1782, consistent with the positional errors given in Neumann et al. (1994) and Gregory & Condon (1991). Because the positional uncertainty of the Green Bank positions (which greatly dominate the uncertainties in the VLA positions) are flux dependent, we split the data into two subsets: a bright and faint sample with a division at 75 mJy. We find that the positional accuracies given in Neumann et al. (1994) are then reliable for these two samples. For the analyses that follow, we therefore exclude all bright sources offset from the GB positions by more than 45tex2html_wrap_inline1784 and all faint sources offset by more than 120tex2html_wrap_inline1786. These criteria exclude 74 objects from the bright sample and 47 objects from the faint. The number of spurious coincidences which remain in the tables is quite small with only tex2html_wrap_inline178831 of the 757 remaining faint sources and tex2html_wrap_inline179010 of the 813 remaining bright sources expected to be spurious. Flags are given in Table 2 to indicate the sources we excluded.

Figure 2 (click here) shows the flux-flux diagram comparing the core VLA flux density with the Green Bank measurement. For those tex2html_wrap_inline179210% of the fields for which more than one source was detected, we have chosen as the ``core'' component that source which is closest to the RASS position. We also considered using the brightest source on the field or the source closest to the GB position. In all the following analyses, the differences between the results obtained using these three different criterion are well within the uncertainties in the data. Only when we completely excluded the fields with more than one detected source did any of the results change significantly, increasing the median core-to-lobe parameter (Sect. 5) by tex2html_wrap_inline179420%. While source variability and uncertainties in both flux density measurements produces a few points in Fig. 2 (click here) where tex2html_wrap_inline1796, it is clear that nearly all of the sources in the GB catalog contain emission which is significantly resolved at the arcsecond-scale.

  figure350
Figure 3: a) Distribution of tex2html_wrap_inline1798, defined as the (VLA core flux density)/(Green Bank flux density - VLA core flux density). This parameter is a rough measure of the radio core-to-lobe ratio. The last bin contains the 118 sources for which the Green Bank flux density is less than the VLA core flux density. b) Distribution of the core-to-lobe ratio for radio galaxies. Bins containing undetected cores are denoted with a left-facing arrow. c) Distribution of the core-to-lobe ratio for BL Lacertae objects. The hatched histogram distinguishes the radio-selected from the X-ray-selected objects


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