The X-ray properties of high-z FRI candidates in the COSMOS field

TL;DR

This study investigates the X-ray properties of high-redshift FRI galaxy candidates in the COSMOS field, revealing diverse nuclear emissions and constraining their surrounding hot gas environments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed X-ray analysis of high-z FRI candidates, highlighting their varied nuclear properties and setting limits on surrounding cluster-scale hot gas.

Findings

Some FRI candidates show significant intrinsic X-ray absorption.

Detected X-ray luminosities are higher than local FRIs.

No evidence for virialized clusters with temperatures above 2-3 keV.

Abstract

We report the X-ray analysis of a sample of candidate high-redshift (1<z<2) FRI sources from the sample of Chiaberge et al. (2009), observed in the Chandra COSMOS field (C-COSMOS). Our main goals are to study their nuclear properties by means of unresolved X-ray emission, and to constrain the presence of clusters surrounding the FRI sources from the diffuse X-ray emission by the associated hot plasma. Among 19 FRI candidates, 6 have an X-ray unresolved counterpart in the C-COSMOS catalog. Two additional sources are not present in the C-COSMOS catalog but are clearly detected in the Chandra images. X-ray spectral analysis, when possible, or hardness ratio of the stacked emission from X-ray detected sources, suggest that some of them have significant intrinsic absorption (N_H~10^22 cm^-2), and high X-ray luminosities with respect to local FRIs. From the stacking analysis of the 11 non-detected sources, however, we find evidence for unresolved soft X-ray emission and no detected hard emission, suggesting an unabsorbed spectrum. Therefore, the X-ray properties vary significantly from source to source among these FRI candidates. From the analysis of the stacked images of all 19 FRI candidates we can rule out the presence of virialized haloes with temperatures larger than 2-3 keV; however, the upper limit on the average extended emission is still consistent with the presence of ~1-2 keV hot gas.