MOJAVE: Monitoring of Jets in Active Galactic Nuclei with VLBA Experiments. III. Deep VLA Images at 1.4 GHz

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
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°) at any epoch between 1994 and 2003. Since 1994 we have been gathering VLBA data on the sample to measure superluminal 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.