Giant Radio Sources as a probe of the cosmological evolution of the IGM, II. The observational constraint for the model of the radio-jets propagation through the X-ray halo--IGM interface

TL;DR

This study uses high-redshift FRII radio sources to test a dynamical model of jet propagation through galaxy halos and the IGM, revealing that giant radio sources exist up to redshift 2 and are mainly quasars with powerful jets.

Contribution

It updates the jet propagation model with modern X-ray data and provides observational constraints on the evolution of giant radio sources across cosmic time.

Findings

Giant radio sources up to 1 Mpc exist at z~2.

Largest radio sources with 1<z<2 are quasars.

These sources are younger and expand faster than lower-redshift counterparts.

Abstract

hree limited samples of high-redshift radio sources of FRII-type are used to constrain the dynamical model for the jets' propagation through the two-media environment: the X-ray emitting halo with the power-law density profile surrounding the parent galaxy and the much hotter intergalactic medium (IGM) of a constant density. The model originally developed by Gopal-Krishna & Wiita (1987) is modified adopting modern values of its free parameters taken from recent X-ray measurements with the XMM-Newton and Chandra Observatories. We find that (i) giant-sized radio sources ($\sim$1 Mpc) exist at redshifts up to $z\sim 2$, (ii) all newly identified the largest radio sources with $1<z<2$ appeared to be quasars, (iii) all of them are younger and expanding faster than their counterparts at lower redshifts, and (iv) the above properties are rather due to the powerful jets than peculiar environmental conditions (e.g. voids) in the IGM. The extreme powerful jets may testify to a dominant role of the accretion processes onto black holes in earlier cosmological epochs.