A New Catalog of Head Tail Radio Galaxies from the VLA FIRST Survey

Abstract

The head--tail (HT) morphology of radio galaxies is seen for a class of radio sources where the primary lobes are being bent in the intercluster weather due to strong interactions between the radio jets and their respective intracluster medium. A systematic search has been carried out for new HT radio galaxies from the Very Large Array Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters survey database at $1400\,\mathrm{MHz}$. Here, we present a catalog of 717 new HT sources, among which 287 are narrow-angle tail (NAT) sources whose opening angle between the two lobes is less than $90^\circ$, and 430 are wide-angle tail (WAT) whose opening angle between the two lobes is greater than $90^\circ$. NAT radio sources are characterized by tails bent in a narrow ``V''-like shape; the jet bending in the case of WAT radio galaxies are such that the WATs exhibit wide ``C''-like morphologies. Optical counterparts are found for 359 HT sources. We report HT sources with luminosity ranges $10^{38} \lesssim L_{1.4\,\mathrm{GHz}} \lesssim 10^{45}\,\mathrm{erg\,s^{-1}}$ and redshifts up to 2.01. The various physical properties of these HT sources are mentioned here. Some statistical studies have been done for this large number of newly discovered HT sources.