arXiv · 2609.32451
AGN hosting jets. II: Deriving fundamental information from semi-analytical models and the LoTSS sample
Abstract
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 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 throughout several orders of magnitude in power, and the comparison with observational samples. 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 sample from the LoTSS survey. We apply our semi-analytical model for the evolution of radio galaxies and generate hundreds of thousands of sources applying random selection of parameters within probability distributions for each of them. Our results show that the model is able to reproduce the main features of the observed sample, and identifies 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 an active time distribution probability p(t_max) \propto 1/t_{max}. 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. Our model predicts that at least 3-4 x 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.
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Pau Beltrán-Palau, Manel Perucho, José-María Martí, Xavier López-López. 2026-09-26. AGN hosting jets. II: Deriving fundamental information from semi-analytical models and the LoTSS sample. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32451
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