VLA imaging of obscured WISE+NVSS QSOs

The sample was selected to have extremely red mid-infrared-optical color ratios based on data from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) along with a detection of bright, unresolved radio emission from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) or Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm Survey.

Our high-resolution VLA observations have revealed that the majority of the sources in our sample (93 out of 155) are compact on angular scales <0.2 (<=1.7kpc at z~2). The radio luminosities, linear extents, and lobe pressures of our sources are similar to young radio active galactic nuclei (e.g., gigahertz-peaked spectrum [GPS] and compact steep-spectrum [CSS] sources), but their space density is considerably lower. Application of a simple adiabatic lobe expansion model suggests relatively young dynamical ages (~10^4-7yr^), relatively high ambient ISM densities (~1-10^4^cm^-3^), and modest lobe expansion speeds (~30-10000km/s).