Active galactic nuclei hosting jets
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Context. Galactic activity has been shown to play a fundamental role in galaxy and cluster evolution throughout the history of the Universe. In the last decades, a number of works have tackled the determination of radio luminosity functions and their evolution, with the aim of trying to understand and quantify this role. In this work we propose a different approach, based on the application of a semi-analytical model to produce mock populations of radio loud active galaxies over several orders of magnitude in power, and the comparison of the model with observational samples. Aims. The aim of this work is to test the ability of our semi-analytical model to reproduce luminosity and size distributions of large numbers of sources from the radio-loud active galactic nuclei (RLAGN) sample from the LoTSS survey. This is an initial step in the potential application of the method ’to probe high-redshift populations and eventually study the evolution of galactic activity via comparison with current and future surveys to validate our approach. Methods. We applied our semi-analytical model for the evolution of radio galaxies and generated hundreds of thousands of sources by applying a random selection of parameters within probability distributions for each of them. Then we compared our results with those of RLAGN in the LoTSS sample. Results. Our results show that the model is able to reproduce the main features of the observed sample; we identify the jet mass-load included in our model and activity periods as critical parameters that should be addressed in more detail in future work. These initial results allow us to establish a maximum activity period ranging from 10 to 200 Myr within a uniform logarithmic distribution, i.e., with an active time distribution probability p ( t max ) ∝ t max −1 . We also reproduce the radio luminosity function for the z < 0.6 population, and the jet power spectrum from 10 34.5 W to 10 38 W. Our results show that mass-load is a fundamental parameter in the determination of radio source luminosities with distance, mainly in the low-power regime. Here we use a characterization of mass-load that accounts for dependence on the jet power and galaxy size. Our model predicts that at least 3 − 4 × 10 5 radio galaxies must exist in the LoTSS field in order to obtain the 17045 observed ones. This population is vastly dominated by low-power sources.
Source: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,865
OpenAlex ID: W7215121192