Large Scale Impact of the Cosmological Population of Expanding Radio Galaxies

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to estimate how much volume radio galaxies occupy and their magnetic influence over the universe's history, highlighting their potential role in cosmic evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation-based method to quantify the volume and magnetic impact of radio galaxies across cosmic time.

Findings

Radio galaxies fill 10-30% of the universe's volume.

Magnetic fields infused by radio galaxies reach about 10^{-8} G.

Radio galaxies significantly influence cosmic magnetic fields.

Abstract

We seek to compute the fraction of the volume of the Universe filled by expanding cocoons of the cosmological population of radio galaxies over the Hubble time as well as the magnetic field infused by them, in order to assess their importance in the cosmic evolution of the Universe. Using N-body $\Lambda$CDM simulations, radio galaxies distributed according to the observed radio luminosity function are allowed to evolve in a cosmological volume as using well defined prescriptions for their expansion. We find that the radio galaxies permeate $10 - 30%$ of the total volume with $\sim 10^{-8}$ G magnetic field by the present epoch.