A Zone of Avoidance catalogue of 2MASS bright galaxies. I. Sample description and analysis

Abstract

We present a homogeneous 2MASS bright galaxy catalogue at low Galactic latitudes ($|b|\le 10.0^{\mathrm{o}}$, called Zone of Avoidance) which is complete to a Galactic extinction-corrected magnitude of $K_s^o\le 11.25^{\mathrm{m}}$. It also includes galaxies in regions of high foreground extinctions ($E(B-V)>0.95^{\mathrm{m}}$) situated at higher latitudes. This catalogue forms the basis of studies of large-scale structures, flow fields and extinction across the ZoA and complements the ongoing 2MASS Redshift and Tully-Fisher surveys. It comprises 3763 galaxies, 70% of which have at least one radial velocity measurement in the literature. The catalogue is complete up to star density levels of $\log N_{\ast }/{\mathrm{deg}}^2<4.5$ and at least for $A_K<0.6^{\mathrm{m}}$ and likely as high as $A_K=20^{\mathrm{m}}$. Thus the ZoA in terms of bright NIR galaxies covers only $2.5-4$% of the whole sky. We use a diameter-dependent extinction correction to compare our sample with an unobscured, high-latitude sample. While the correction to the $K_s$ -band magnitude is sufficient, the corrected diameters are too small by about $4^{\prime \prime }$ on average. The omission of applying such a diameter-dependent extinction correction may lead to a biased flow field even at intermediate extinction values as found in the 2MRS survey. A slight dependence of galaxy colour with stellar density indicates that unsubtracted foreground stars make galaxies appear bluer. Furthermore, far-infrared sources in the DIRBE/IRAS extinction maps that were not removed at low latitudes affect the foreground extinction corrections of three galaxies and may weakly affect a further estimated $\approx 20$% of our galaxies.

29 pages, 16 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS; full catalogue available as ancillary file in sourcefile package

References in corpus (18)

• The UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey
• Reconstructed Density and Velocity Fields from the 2MASS Redshift Survey
• The UKIRT Hemisphere Survey: Definition and J-band Data Release
• The DECam Plane Survey: Optical photometry of two billion objects in the southern Galactic plane
• Deep Near-IR Surface Photometry of 57 Galaxies in the Local Sphere of Influence
• The SDSS-2MASS-WISE Ten Dimensional Stellar Color Locus
• Discovery of a supercluster in the ZOA in Vela
• 2MTF III. HI 21cm observations of 1194 spiral galaxies with the Green Bank Telescope
• Dynamical Constraints on the Local Group from the CMB and 2MRS Dipoles
• Cosmicflows-3: Cold Spot Repeller?
• The highly obscured region around PKS1343-601 - I. Galactic interstellar extinctions using DENIS galaxy colours
• The Nancay HI Zone of Avoidance survey of 2MASS bright galaxies
• Bulk flow in the combined 2MTF and 6dFGSv surveys
• The ALFA ZOA Deep Survey: First Results
• Deep NIR photometry of HI galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance
• NIR Tully-Fisher in the Zone of Avoidance. -- III. Deep NIR catalogue of the HIZOA galaxies
• Predicting Structures in the Zone of Avoidance
• On How to Extend the NIR Tully-Fisher Relation to be Truly All-Sky

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The 2MASS redshift survey galaxy group catalogue derived from a graph-theory based friends-of-friends algorithm
• 21 new long-term variables in the GX 339-4 field: two years of MeerKAT monitoring
• The VVV Near-IR Galaxy Catalogue beyond the Galactic disk
• EZOA -- A catalogue of EBHIS HI detected galaxies in the northern Zone of Avoidance
• The VVV near-IR galaxy catalogue in a Northern part of the Galactic disc
• Overdensity of VVV galaxies behind the Galactic bulge
• The Distance and Peculiar Velocity of the Norma cluster (ACO 3627) using the Near-Infrared $J$ and $K_s$-band Fundamental Plane Relations
• A comparative analysis of Galactic extinction at low Galactic latitudes
• A galaxy cluster in the innermost Zone of Avoidance, close to the radio phoenix VLSSJ2217.5+594
• Galaxy clustering in the VVV Near-IR Galaxy Catalogue