A Search for double-lobed radio emission from Galactic Stars and Spiral Galaxies

Abstract

We present a systematic search for two types of very unusual astronomical objects: Galactic stars and spiral galaxies with double radio lobes, i.e. radio emission on opposite sides of the optical object, suggesting the ejection of jets from them. We designed an algorithm to search for pairs of radio sources straddling objects from two unprecedented samples of 878,031 Galactic stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and 675,874 spiral galaxy candidates drawn from the recent literature. We found three new examples of double-lobed radio stars, while for the spiral galaxies we only rediscovered one known such double source, confirming that the latter objects are extremely rare.