Where is the Cold Neutral Gas in the Hosts of High Redshift AGN?

TL;DR

This study investigates the presence of cold neutral gas in high-redshift AGN hosts, revealing a lack of 21-cm absorption in ultra-violet luminous quasars, challenging the orientation-based unified model of AGN.

Contribution

It provides the first evidence that high UV luminosity quasars at high redshift lack 21-cm absorption, suggesting factors beyond orientation influence cold gas detection.

Findings

No 21-cm absorption detected in z > 3 sources.

High UV luminosity correlates with non-detections across redshifts.

Orientation effects alone cannot explain detection patterns.

Abstract

Previous surveys for HI 21-cm absorption in z > 0.1 radio galaxies and quasars yield a 40% detection rate, which is attributed to unified schemes of active galactic nuclei (AGN). In this paradigm absorption is only witnessed in (close to) type-2 objects, where the central obscuration is viewed (nearly) edge-on and thus absorbs the rest frame 1420 MHz emission along our sight-line. However, we find this mix of detections and non-detections to only apply at low redshift (z < 1): From a sensitive survey of eight z > 3 radio sources we find no 21-cm absorption, indicating a low abundance of cold neutral gas in (the sight-lines searched in) these objects. Analysing the spectral energy distributions of these sources, we find that our high redshift selection introduces a bias where our sample consists exclusively of quasars with ultra-violet luminosities in excess of 10e23 W/Hz. This may suggest that we have selected a class of particularly UV bright type-1 objects. Whatever the cause, it must also be invoked to explain the non-detections in an equal number of z < 0.7 sources, where we find, for the first time, the same exclusive non-detections at > 10e23 W/Hz. These objects also turn out to be quasars and, from these exclusive high UV luminosity--21-cm non-detections, it is apparent that orientation effects alone cannot account for the mix of 21-cm detections and non-detections at any redshift.