English

Cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff-Riley type II source population

Astrophysics 2009-11-13 v1

Abstract

By combining a model for the evolution of the radio luminosity of an individual source with the radio luminosity function, we perform a multi-dimensional Monte-Carlo simulation to investigate the cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff-Riley Class II radio galaxy population by generating large artificial samples. The properties of FRII sources are required to evolve with redshift in the artificial samples to fit the observations. Either the maximum jet age or the maximum density of the jet environment or both evolve with redshift. We also study the distribution of FRII source properties as a function of redshift. From currently available data we can not constrain the shape of the distribution of environment density or age, but jet power is found to follow a power-law distribution with an exponent of approximately -2. This power-law slope does not change with redshift out to z=0.6. We also find the distribution of the pressure in the lobes of FRII sources to evolve with redshift up to z1.2z\sim1.2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.4541,
  title  = {Cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff-Riley type II source population},
  author = {Y. Wang and C. R. Kaiser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.4541},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

22 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:45:20.706Z