MOJAVE: Monitoring of jets in active galactic nuclei with VLBA experiments. III. Deep VLA images at 1.4 Ghz

摘要

The MOJAVE blazar sample consists of the 133 brightest, most compact radio-loud AGNs in the northern sky, and it is selected on the basis of VLBA 2 cm correlated flux density exceeding 1.5 Jy ( 2 Jy for declinations south of 0 degrees) at any epoch between 1994 and 2003. Since 1994 we have been gathering VLBA data on the sample to measure super-luminal jet speeds and to better understand the parsec-scale kinematics of AGN jets. We have obtained 1.4 GHz VLA A configuration data on 57 of these sources to investigate whether the extended luminosity of blazars is correlated with parsec-scale jet speed and also to determine what other parsec-scale properties are related to extended morphology, such as optical emission line strength and gamma-ray emission. We present images and measurements of the kiloparsec scale emission from the VLA data, which will be used in subsequent statistical studies of the MOJAVE sample.