Nonblind Catalog of Extragalactic Point Sources from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP ) First 3 Year Survey Data

We have used the MHW2 filter to obtain estimates of the flux densities at theWMAP frequencies of a complete sample of 2491 sources, mostly brighter than 500mJy at 5 GHz, distributed over the whole sky excluding a strip around theGalactic equator (b < 5 degrees). After having detected 933 sources above the 3sigma level in the MHW2 filtered maps - our New Extragalactic WMAP Point Source(NEWPS_3sigma) Catalogue - we are left with 381 sources above 5 sigma in atleast one WMAP channel, 369 of which constitute our NEWPS_5sigma catalogue. Itis remarkable to note that 98 (i.e. 26%) sources detected above 5 sigma are`new', they are not present in the WMAP catalogue. Source fluxes have beencorrected for the Eddington bias. Our flux density estimates before suchcorrection are generally in good agreement with the WMAP ones at 23 GHz. Athigher frequencies WMAP fluxes tend to be slightly higher than ours, probablybecause WMAP estimates neglect the deviations of the point spread function froma Gaussian shape. On the whole, above the estimated completeness limit of 1.1Jy at 23 GHz we detected 43 sources missed by the blind method adopted by theWMAP team. On the other hand, our low-frequency selection threshold left out 25WMAP sources, only 12 of which, however, are 5 sigma detections and only 3 havefluxes S at 23 GHz > 1.1 Jy. Thus, our approach proved to be competitive with,and complementary to the WMAP one.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ