Intra-night optical variability and radio characteristics of extremely radio-loud narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies

Abstract

Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) are generally known to be radio-quiet Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), but a tiny subset of them are found to be extremely radio-loud with radio loudness parameter ($R_{1.4\mathrm{GHz}}$) $>$ 100. Given their rarity we investigated intra-night optical variability (INOV) and radio characteristics of a sample of 16 extremely radio-loud NLS1s. For all but four sample sources we report intra-night photometric monitoring for the first time with at least one monitoring session per source lasting for a minimum of 3.0 hours duration. In our sample, we detect INOV with a high duty cycle (up to 25 per cent) and large average amplitude ($\overline{\psi }$ $\sim$ 0.16) similar to that found in blazars. Using 3.0 GHz Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) and auxiliary multi-frequency radio data we find that our RL-NLS1s are luminous ($L_{3.0\mathrm{GHz}}$ $\ge$ 10${}^{24}$ W~Hz${}^{-1}$), compact (less than a few kpc), variable, flat spectrum (${\alpha }_{\mathrm{radio}}$ $>$ -0.5) radio sources. The INOV, radio characteristics, and radio luminosity ($L_{1.4\mathrm{GHz}}$) versus super-massive black hole mass ($M_{\mathrm{SMBH}}$) plot infer that extremely radio-loud NLS1s are low-$z$ and low-luminosity analogs of flat spectrum radio quasars wherein the former are powered by, on average, one order-of-magnitude less massive SMBHs.

24 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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