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

We have used the MHW2 filter to obtain estimates of the flux densities at the WMAP frequencies of a complete sample of 2491 sources, mostly brighter than 500 mJy at 5 GHz, distributed over the whole sky excluding a strip around the Galactic equator (| b | ≤ 5°). After having detected 933 sources at the ≥3 σ level in the MHW2 filtered maps—our New Extragalactic WMAP Point Source Catalogue (NEWPS 3 σ )—we are left with 381 sources at ≥5 σ in at least one WMAP channel, 369 of which constitute our NEWPS 5 σ catalog. It is remarkable to note that 98 (i.e., 26%) sources detected at ≥5 σ are "new," they are not present in the WMAP catalog. Source fluxes have been corrected for the Eddington bias. Our flux density estimates before such correction are generally in good agreement with the WMAP ones at 23 GHz. At higher frequencies WMAP fluxes tend to be slightly higher than ours, probably because WMAP estimates neglect the deviations of the point spread function from a Gaussian shape. On the whole, above the estimated completeness limit of 1.1 Jy at 23 GHz we detected 43 sources missed by the blind method adopted by the WMAP team. On the other hand, our low-frequency selection threshold left out 25 WMAP sources, only 12 of which, however, are ≥5 σ detections and only three have S 23 GHz ≥ 1.1 Jy. Thus, our approach proved to be competitive with and complementary to the WMAP one.