A DEEP VERY LARGE ARRAY RADIO CONTINUUM SURVEY OF THE CORE AND OUTSKIRTS OF THE COMA CLUSTER

We present deep 1.4 GHz Very Large Array radio continuum observations of two ~0.5 deg2 fields in the Coma cluster of galaxies. The two fields, Coma 1 and Coma 3, correspond to the cluster core and southwest infall region and were selected on account of abundant preexisting multiwavelength data. In their most sensitive regions the radio data reach 22 μJy rms per 44 beam, sufficient to detect (at 5σ) Coma member galaxies with L 1.4 GHz = 1.3 × 1020 W Hz–1. The full catalog of radio detections is presented herein and consists of 1030 sources detected at ≥5σ, 628 of which are within the combined Coma 1 and Coma 3 area. We also provide optical identifications of the radio sources using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The depth of the radio observations allows us to detect active galactic nucleus in cluster elliptical galaxies with Mr < –20.5 (AB magnitudes), including radio detections for all cluster ellipticals with Mr < –21.8. At fainter optical magnitudes (–20.5 < Mr –19), the radio sources are associated with star-forming galaxies with star formation rates as low as 0.1 M ☉ yr–1.