Cosmological evolution of the Fanaroff-Riley type II source population

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to explore how the properties and evolution of Fanaroff-Riley Class II radio galaxies change with redshift, revealing that jet power follows a consistent power-law distribution and that lobe pressure evolves with redshift.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach combining luminosity evolution with population modeling to analyze FRII galaxy evolution across cosmic time.

Findings

Jet power distribution follows a -2 power-law slope, unchanged up to z=0.6.

Maximum jet age or environment density evolves with redshift.

Lobe pressure distribution evolves with redshift up to z~1.2.

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 $z\sim1.2$.