Nature and evolution of powerful radio galaxies and their link with the quasar luminosity function

Abstract

Current wide-area radio surveys are dominated by active galactic nuclei, yet many of these sources have no identified optical counterparts. Here we investigate whether one can constrain the nature and properties of these sources, using Fanaroff-Riley type II (FRII) radio galaxies as probes. These sources are easy to identify since the angular separation of their lobes remains almost constant at some tens of arcseconds for z>1. Using a simple algorithm applied to the FIRST survey, we obtain the largest FRII sample to date, containing over ten thousand double-lobed sources. A subset of 459 sources is matched to SDSS quasars. This sample yields a statistically meaningful description of the fraction of quasars with lobes as a function of redshift and luminosity. This relation is combined with the bolometric quasar luminosity function, as derived from surveys at IR to hard X-ray frequencies, and a disc-lobe correlation to obtain a robust prediction for the density of FRIIs on the radio sky. We find that the observed density can be explained by the population of known quasars, implying that the majority of powerful jets originate from a radiatively efficient accretion flow with a linear jet-disc coupling. Finally, we show that high-redshift jets are more often quenched within 100 kpc, suggesting a higher efficiency of jet-induced feedback into their host galaxies.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (20)

• X-ray Properties of Black-Hole Binaries
• A Catalog of Quasar Properties from SDSS DR7
• An Observational Determination of the Bolometric Quasar Luminosity Function
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog IV. Fifth Data Release
• The VLA Low-frequency Sky Survey
• Absorption Properties and Evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei
• The Very Large Array Low-frequency Sky Survey Redux (VLSSr)
• The Radio-Loud Fraction of Quasars is a Strong Function of Redshift and Optical Luminosity
• Think Outside the Color Box: Probabilistic Target Selection and the SDSS-XDQSO Quasar Targeting Catalog
• Accretion states and radio loudness in Active Galactic Nuclei: analogies with X-ray binaries
• A Unified Catalog of Radio Objects Detected by NVSS, FIRST, WENSS, GB6, and SDSS
• Spitzer Reveals Hidden Quasar Nuclei in Some Powerful FR II Radio Galaxies
• Luminosity function, sizes and FR dichotomy of radio-loud AGN
• In search of dying radio sources in the local universe
• Observed properties of FRII quasars and radio galaxies at z < 1.0
• Radio galaxies of the local universe: all-sky catalog, luminosity functions, and clustering
• Measuring the accretion rate and kinetic luminosity functions of supermassive black holes
• Correlations of Quasar Optical Spectra with Radio Morphology
• Radio AGN in 13,240 galaxy clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Discovery of a red quasar with recurrent activity

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Classifying Radio Galaxies with Convolutional Neural Network
• Quasars That Have Transitioned from Radio-quiet to Radio-loud on Decadal Timescales Revealed by VLASS and FIRST
• On the population of remnant FRII radio galaxies and implications for radio source dynamics
• Interplanetary Scintillation studies with the Murchison Wide-field Array II: Properties of sub-arcsecond compact sources at low radio frequencies
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: Cosmological Alignment of Radio Sources
• The Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Background from Core Dominated Radio Galaxies
• On the efficiency of jet production in FR II radio galaxies and quasars
• The Magnetic Field and Polarization Properties of Radio Galaxies in Different Accretion States
• Radio source-component association for the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey with region-based convolutional neural networks
• Tailed Radio Galaxies from the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey
• Soft gamma-ray selected giant radio galaxies: an update
• Search for hybrid morphology radio galaxies from FIRST survey at 1400 MHz
• The Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey: SZ effect Verification with the Atacama Compact Array -- Localization and Cluster Analysis
• Continuous Filament Network of the Local Universe
• A new distant Giant Radio Galaxy in the Boötes field serendipitously detected by Chandra
• Mapping feedback signatures in 3C 297: A quasar-host merger at Cosmic Noon