Radio Continuum Survey of an Optically Selected Sample of Nearby Seyfert Galaxies

Abstract

We have used the Very Large Array (VLA) to conduct a survey for radio continuum emission in the sample of 52 Seyfert nuclei selected from the optical spectroscopic galaxy catalog of Ho, Filippenko, and Sargent. This Seyfert sample is the most complete and least biased available, and, as such, it will be useful for a variety of statistical analyses. Here we present the observations, measurements, and an atlas of radio maps. The observations were made at 6 cm in the B-array and at 20 cm in the A-array, yielding matched angular resolutions of approximately 1". We detected 44 objects (85%) at 6 cm and 37 objects (71%) at 20 cm above a 3-sigma threshold of 0.12 mJy/beam. The sources have a wide range of radio powers (10^{18}-10^{25} W/Hz), spectral indices (+0.5 to -1 between 20 and 6 cm), and linear sizes (from a few tens pc to 15 kpc). The morphology of the radio emission is predominantly that of a compact core, either unresolved or slightly resolved, occasionally accompanied by elongated, jet-like features. Linearly polarized emission was detected at 6 cm in 12 sources, 9 of which were also detected at 20 cm.