Radio Properties of Infrared‐Selected Galaxies in theIRAS2 Jy Sample

The radio counterparts to the IRAS Redshift Survey galaxies are identified inthe NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) catalog. Our new catalog of the infraredflux-limited (S60 >= 2 Jy) complete sample of 1809 galaxies lists accurateradio positions, redshifts, and 1.4 GHz radio and IRAS fluxes. This sample issix times larger in size and five times deeper in redshift coverage (to z ~0.15) compared with those used in earlier studies of the radio and far-infrared(FIR) properties of galaxies in the local volume. The well known radio-FIRcorrelation is obeyed by the overwhelming majority (>98%) of theinfrared-selected galaxies, and the radio AGNs identified by their excess radioemission constitute only about 1% of the sample, independent of the IRluminosity. These FIR-selected galaxies can account for the entire populationof late-type field galaxies in the local volume, and their radio continuum maybe used directly to infer the extinction-free star formation rate in mostcases. Both the 1.4 GHz radio and 60 micron infrared luminosity functions arereasonably well described by linear sums of two Schechter functions, onerepresenting normal, late-type field galaxies and the second representingstarbursts and other luminous infrared galaxies. The integrated FIR luminositydensity for the local volume is 4.8+/-0.5 x 10^7 L(sun) per Mpc^3, less than10% of which is contributed by the luminous infrared galaxies with L(FIR) >10^{11} L(sun) . The inferred extinction-free star formation density for thelocal volume is 0.015 +/- 0.005 solar mass per year per Mpc^3.Comment: 34 pages with 15 embedded figures and 7 tables. Latex using aastex and psfig.sty. To appear in the Astrophysical Journal (2001) (typos corrected and Fig. 13 replaced in v2.