The nuclear properties and extended morphologies of powerful radio galaxies: the roles of host galaxy and environment

Abstract

Powerful radio galaxies exist as either compact or extended sources, with the extended sources traditionally classified by their radio morphologies as Fanaroff--Riley (FR) type I and II sources. FRI/II and compact radio galaxies have also been classified by their optical spectra into two different types: high excitation (HERG; quasar-mode) and low excitation (LERG; jet-mode). We present a catalogue of visual morphologies for a complete sample of $>$1000 1.4-GHz-selected extended radio sources from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We study the environment and host galaxy properties of FRI/II and compact sources, classified into HERG/LERG types, in order to separate and distinguish the factors that drive the radio morphological variations from those responsible for the spectral properties. Comparing FRI LERGs with FRII LERGs at fixed stellar mass and radio luminosity, we show that FRIs typically reside in richer environments and are hosted by smaller galaxies with higher mass surface density; this is consistent with extrinsic effects of jet disruption driving the FR dichotomy. Using matched samples of HERGs and LERGs, we show that HERG host galaxies are more frequently star-forming, with more evidence for disk-like structure than LERGs, in accordance with currently-favoured models of fundamentally different fuelling mechanisms. Comparing FRI/II LERGs with compact LERGs, we find the primary difference is that compact objects typically harbour less massive black holes. This suggests that lower-mass black holes may be less efficient at launching stable radio jets, or do so for shorter times. Finally, we investigate rarer sub-classes: wide-angle tail, head-tail, FR-hybrid and double-double sources.

MNRAS, Vol. 466, pp. 4346-4363, 2017, supplementary data has been added

References in corpus (9)

• The Host Galaxies and Classification of Active Galactic Nuclei
• On the prevalence of radio-loud AGN in brightest cluster galaxies: implications for AGN heating of cooling flows
• Luminosity function, sizes and FR dichotomy of radio-loud AGN
• The cosmic evolution of radio-AGN feedback to z=1
• Radio galaxies in the 2SLAQ Luminous Red Galaxy Survey: I. The evolution of low-power radio galaxies to z~0.7
• Measuring the accretion rate and kinetic luminosity functions of supermassive black holes
• Internal entrainment and the origin of jet-related broad-band emission in Centaurus A
• A sample of mJy radio sources at 1.4 GHz in the Lynx and Hercules fields - II. Cosmic evolution of the space density of FRI radio sources
• IGM Heating in Fossil Galaxy Groups

Cited by in corpus (56)

• Compact steep-spectrum and peaked-spectrum radio sources
• Revisiting the Fanaroff-Riley dichotomy and radio-galaxy morphology with the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS)
• FRII{\sl{CAT}}: A FIRST catalog of FR~II radio galaxies
• High-resolution VLA observations of FR0 radio galaxies: properties and nature of compact radio sources
• The duty cycle of radio galaxies revealed by LOFAR: remnant and restarted radio source populations in the Lockman Hole
• Accretion mode versus radio morphology in the LOFAR Deep Fields
• The Relativistic Jet Dichotomy and the End of the Blazar Sequence
• CNN Architecture Comparison for Radio Galaxy Classification
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: A Search for Hybrid Morphology Radio Galaxies
• Fanaroff-Riley classification of radio galaxies using group-equivariant convolutional neural networks
• Attention-gating for improved radio galaxy classification
• Parsec-scale radio structure of 14 Fanaroff-Riley type 0 radio galaxies
• Radio sources associated with Optical Galaxies and having Unresolved or Extended morphologies (ROGUE). I. A catalog of SDSS galaxies with FIRST core identifications
• PKS 1424+240: yet another masquerading BL Lac object as a possible IceCube neutrino source
• Jets in radio galaxies and quasars: an observational perspective
• Deciphering the large-scale environment of radio galaxies in the local Universe: where do they born, grow and die?
• The Stripe 82 1-2 GHz Very Large Array Snapshot Survey: host galaxy properties and accretion rates of radio galaxies
• The effect of environment on AGN activity: the properties of radio and optical AGN in void, isolated and group galaxies
• Giant radio galaxies in the LoTSS Boötes deep field
• The Dynamics and Energetics of Remnant and Restarting RLAGN
• Deciphering the Large-Scale Environment of Radio Galaxies in the Local Universe II. A Statistical Analysis of Environmental Properties
• Jet-accretion system in the nearby mJy Radio Galaxies
• Placing LOFAR-detected quasars in CIV emission space: implications for winds, jets and star formation
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: Observational evidence for environment as the cause of radio source asymmetry
• Enabling Unsupervised Discovery in Astronomical Images through Self-Supervised Representations
• Quantifying Uncertainty in Deep Learning Approaches to Radio Galaxy Classification
• A Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Radio Galaxy and Infrared Host Detection
• Structured Variational Inference for Simulating Populations of Radio Galaxies
• The role of environment in the observed Fundamental Plane of radio Active Galactic Nuclei
• Morphological Classification of Radio Galaxies with wGAN-supported Augmentation
• Ionized Gas Outflows in Low Excitation Radio Galaxies Are Radiation Driven
• RAiSE X: searching for radio galaxies in X-ray surveys
• A Wide and Deep Exploration of Radio Galaxies with Subaru HSC (WERGS). VI. Distant Filamentary Structures Pointed by High-z Radio Galaxies at z~4
• A Wide and Deep Exploration of Radio Galaxies with Subaru HSC (WERGS). VII. Redshift Evolution of Radio Galaxy Environments at z=0.3-1.4
• A new method for finding and characterizing galaxy groups via low-frequency radio surveys
• Faint $\gamma$-ray sources at low-redshift: the radio galaxy IC 1531
• The Host Galaxies of Hybrid Morphology Radio Sources
• Identification of 4876 Bent-Tail Radio Galaxies in the FIRST Survey Using Deep Learning Combined with Visual Inspection
• VLA Snapshot Continuum Survey of FRI Quasar Candidates Selected from the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS)
• The faint radio source population at 15.7 GHz -- IV. The dominance of core emission in faint radio galaxies
• The relation between the radio emission of the core and host galaxy properties in Fanaroff-Riley type II radio galaxies
• LeMMINGs. VI. Connecting nuclear activity to bulge properties of active and inactive galaxies: radio scaling relations and galaxy environment
• Selected Chapters on Active Galactic Nuclei as Relativistic Systems
• Morphological Classification of Radio Galaxies using Semi-Supervised Group Equivariant CNNs
• No dependence of radio properties of brightest group galaxies on the luminosity gap
• Catalog of One-side Head-Tail Galaxies in the FIRST Survey
• A Morphological Identification and Study of Radio Galaxies from LoTSS DR2. I. The "Winged'' Radio Galaxies
• Radio Halo Detection in MWA Data using Deep Neural Networks and Generative Data Augmentation
• Hosts and environments: a (large-scale) radio history of AGN and star-forming galaxies
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: Using semi-supervised learning to leverage large unlabelled data-sets for radio galaxy classification under data-set shift
• E(2)-Equivariant Features in Machine Learning for Morphological Classification of Radio Galaxies
• Radio Galaxy Zoo: Morphological classification by Fanaroff-Riley designation using self-supervised pre-training
• The eMERLIN and EVN view of FR0 radio galaxies
• Weight Pruning and Uncertainty in Radio Galaxy Classification
• The High Energy View of FR0 Radio Galaxies
• Can semi-supervised learning reduce the amount of manual labelling required for effective radio galaxy morphology classification?