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Session 103 - Quasars & Blazars.
Display session, Saturday, January 10
Exhibit Hall,
The VLA FIRST survey offers an unprecedented opportunity to define a sample of quasars which bridge the gap between traditional radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars. With a limiting radio flux density of 1 mJy at 1400 MHz, many of the quasars discovered by the FIRST survey fall near the divide between radio-loud and radio-quiet. Previous radio surveys have not reached deep enough to probe this regime. In a pilot study for the FBQS, Gregg et al.\ (1996, AJ 112, 407) developed criteria to create a candidate list based on matching the FIRST survey to the APM catalog of POSS-I sources. Applying these criteria to the catalog of FIRST sources from the initial 3000 square degrees surveyed, a candidate list of 900 objects brighter than 17.5^\hboxm on the POSS-I E plates was assembled. We have now collected optical spectra for all the candidates and have identified 400 new quasars in addition to 100 previously known quasars. In this paper we present this new radio-selected sample of quasars. We discuss both the statistical properties of the sample and some unusual individual objects (e.g. more than 20 radio-selected BAL QSOs.)
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: rlw@stsci.edu
