A 12μm Flux Limited Sample of Galaxies: Preliminary Results on the IR Luminosity Function

Abstract

An all-sky 12μm flux-limited sample of 392 galaxies has been selected from the IRAS Point Source Catalog. More than 20% of the sample harbor active nuclei (with Seyfert 1 or 2 or LINER emission-line spectra). Thus one byproduct of this work is the definition of a large complete sample of bright active galaxies, with roughly equal percentages of Sy 1's, Sy 2's and LINERs. Since we now have virtually all (93%) the redshifts for the sample galaxies, the far-infrared luminosity functions of all classes of galaxies have been derived using IRAS coadded data. Since our luminosity functions for Sy 1 and Sy 2 are indistinguishable from those of the optically selected CfA sample, the 12μm selection appears to be an efficient and complete technique for finding active galactic nuclei. Optical spectrophotometry and near-IR photometry of the sample is being obtained to compute accurate bolometric luminosities.