2008/05/29 by Y. Wang, Yang Wang, Christian Kaiser +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Luminosity #Luminosity function #Physics #Population #Power law #Quasar #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Radio galaxy #Redshift #Redshift survey #Source counts #Statistics #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13417.x
published as PoS MQW7:068,2008 · 22 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2008/05/29 · openalex publication_date 2008/06/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
By combining a model for the evolution of the radio luminosity of an individual source with the radio luminosity function, we perform a multidimensional Monte Carlo simulation to investigate the cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff–Riley type II (FR II) radio galaxy population by generating large artificial samples. The properties of FR II 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 FR II source properties as a function of redshift. From currently available data we cannot 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 FR II sources to evolve with redshift up to z∼ 1.2.