A mixture evolution scenario of the AGN radio luminosity function. II. Do low- and high-power radio-loud AGNs evolve differently?

Abstract

Following previous work, we further confirm that the cosmic evolution of steep-spectrum radio-loud AGNs (active galactic nuclei) can be reproduced by a simple combination of density evolution (DE) and luminosity evolution (LE). This mixture evolution scenario can naturally explain the luminosity-dependent evolution of radio-loud AGNs. Our models successfully fitted a large amount of data on radio luminosity functions (RLFs) of steep-spectrum sources and multi-frequency source counts. The modeling indicates that the DE slowly increase as $(1+z{)}^{0.3\sim 1.3}$ out to $z\sim 0.8$, and then rapidly decreases as $(1+z{)}^{-6.8\sim -5.7}$, while the LE rapidly increase as $(1+z{)}^{4.8}$ out to a higher redshift (at least $z>3.5$). We find a high-redshift decline (i.e. redshift cutoff) in the number density of steep-spectrum radio sources, but we cannot conclude whether such decline is sharp or shallow. We believe that whether a redshift cutoff occurs or not depends mainly on DE, while its steepness is decided by LE, which, however, cannot be well constrained due to the lack of high-redshift samples. Most intriguingly, according to our mixture evolution scenario, there appears to be no need for different evolution for the low- and high-power radio-loud AGNs. Both types of sources experience the same combined evolution of DE and LE.

Minor typos corrected. The applied correction does not alter any results presented in the paper

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