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The Molonglo Southern 4 Jy Sample (MS4)


Ann Burgess & Dick Hunstead


This is a (nominally) complete sample of 228 strong extragalactic radio sources selected to have

  • Declination between -30° and -85°;
  • Galactic latitude |b| > 10°;
  • Flux density at 408 MHz stronger than 4.0 Jy;
  • Not in the Magellanic Cloud regions.


The sample is described in the following two papers:

  • Burgess AM, Hunstead RW (2006) The Molonglo Southern 4 Jy Sample (MS4). I. Definition.

Published in The Astronomical Journal, volume 131, pp100-113, January 2006.

  • Burgess AM, Hunstead RW (2006) The Molonglo Southern 4 Jy Sample (MS4). II. ATCA Imaging and Optical Identification.

Published in The Astronomical Journal, volume 131, pp114-132, January 2006

Preprints of these papers are available in the astro-ph database (astro-ph/0512588 and astro-ph/0512590). Some of the figures in these preprints had to be compressed to save space. We therefore provide higher-resolution versions of the figures on this web page.

Files for Paper I:

Files for Paper II:

1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h 1i 1j 2 3a 3b 3c 3d 3e 3f 3g 4 5 6

  • PostScript files for individual figures:

1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h 1i 1j 2 3a 3b 3c 3d 3e 3f 3g 4 5 6

Plots of the radio spectra are available as a PDF (12 pages, 1.1 MB). The flux densities used to make the plots are given in this ASCII file.

For more information contact Dick Hunstead

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