The link between accretion mode and environment in radio-loud active galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates the relationship between accretion modes of radio-loud AGN and their environments at different redshifts, revealing correlations for LERGs and potential evolution in HERG environments.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic X-ray environmental comparison of radio galaxies at two different epochs, highlighting differences between HERGs and LERGs and their environmental dependencies.

Findings

Strong correlations between radio luminosity and environment for LERGs.

Tentative evidence of evolution in HERG environments between z~0.5 and z~0.1.

No significant environmental differences for LERGs across epochs.

Abstract

The interactions between radio-loud AGN and their environments play an important role in galaxy and cluster evolution. Recent work has demonstrated fundamental differences between High and Low Excitation Radio Galaxies (HERGs and LERGs), and shown that they may have different relationships with their environments. In the Chandra Large Project ERA (Environments of Radio-loud AGN), we made the first systematic X-ray environmental study of the cluster environments of radio galaxies at a single epoch (z~0.5), and found tentative evidence for a correlation between radio luminosity and cluster X-ray luminosity. We also found that this relationship appeared to be driven by the LERG sub-population (Ineson et al. 2013). We have now repeated the analysis with a low redshift sample (z~0.1), and found strong correlations between radio luminosity and environment richness and between radio luminosity and central density for the LERGs but not for the HERGs. These results are consistent with models in which the HERGs are fuelled from accretion discs maintained from local reservoirs of gas, while LERGs are fuelled more directly by gas ingested from the intra-cluster medium. Comparing the samples, we found that although the maximum environment richness of the HERG environments is similar in both samples, there are poorer HERG environments in the z~0.1 sample than in the z~0.5 sample. We have therefore tentative evidence of evolution of the HERG environments. We found no differences between the LERG sub-samples for the two epochs, as would be expected if radio and cluster luminosity are related.