A Sino-German 6cm polarisation survey of the Galactic plane - VIII.
  Small-diameter sources
  Information of small-diameter sources is extracted from the Sino-German 6cm
polarisation survey of the Galactic plane carried out with the Urumqi 25-m
telescope. We performed two-dimensional elliptical Gaussian fits to the 6cm
maps to obtain a list of sources with total-intensity and polarised flux
densities. The source list contains 3832 sources with a fitted diameter smaller
than 16 arcmin and a peak flux density exceeding 30 mJy, so about 5 times the
rms noise, of the total-intensity data. The cumulative source count indicates
completeness for flux densities exceeding about 60 mJy. We identify 125
linearly polarised sources at 6cm with a peak polarisation flux density greater
than 10 mJy, so about 3 times the rms noise, of the polarised-intensity data.
Despite lacking compact steep spectrum sources, the 6cm catalogue lists about
20 percent more sources than the Effelsberg 21cm source catalogue at the same
angular resolution and for the same area. Most of the faint 6cm sources must
have a flat spectrum and are either HII regions or extragalactic. When compared
with the Green Bank 6cm (GB6) catalogue, we obtain higher flux densities for a
number of extended sources with complex structures. Polarised 6cm sources
density are uniformly distributed in Galactic latitude. Their number density
decreases towards the inner Galaxy. More than 80 percent of the polarised
sources are most likely extragalactic. With a few exceptions, the sources have
a higher percentage polarisation at 6cm than at 21cm. Depolarisation seems to
occur mostly within the sources with a minor contribution from the Galactic
foreground emission.
