Cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff–Riley type II source population |
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| Authors: | Yang Wang Christian R Kaiser |
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| Institution: | School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ |
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| Abstract: | 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 . |
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| Keywords: | methods: statistical galaxies: evolution intergalactic medium galaxies: jets galaxies: luminosity function mass function |
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