Fundamental parameters of FR II radio galaxies and their impact on groups and clusters' environments

TL;DR

This study uses simulations and models to determine the fundamental properties of FR II radio galaxies and assess their energetic impact on galaxy cluster environments across cosmic time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation-based approach to constrain intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of FR II radio galaxies and evaluate their feedback effects on clusters.

Findings

Robust estimates of energy injection into clusters despite parameter degeneracies

Constraints on kinetic luminosities, lifetimes, and ambient gas densities of FR IIs

Evidence of significant AGN feedback influencing galaxy cluster evolution

Abstract

Radio galaxies are among the largest and most powerful single objects known and are found at variety of redshifts, hence they are believed to have had a significant impact on the evolving Universe. Their relativistic jets inject considerable amounts of energy into the environments in which the sources reside; thus the knowledge of the fundamental properties (such as kinetic luminosities, lifetimes and ambient gas densities) of these sources is crucial for understanding AGN feedback in galaxy clusters. In this work, we explore the intrinsic and extrinsic fundamental properties of Fanaroff-Riley II (FR II) objects through the construction of multidimensional Monte Carlo simulations which use complete, flux limited radio catalogues and semi-analytical models of FR IIs' time evolution to create artificial samples of radio galaxies. This method allows us to set better limits on the confidence intervals of the intrinsic and extrinsic fundamental parameters and to investigate the total energy produced and injected to the clusters' environments by populations of FR IIs at various cosmological epochs (0.0<z<2.0). We find the latter estimates to be strikingly robust despite the strong degeneracy between the fundamental parameters -- such a result points to a conclusive indicator of the scale of AGN feedback in clusters of galaxies.