Search and Characterization of Remnant Radio Galaxies in the XMM-LSS Deep Field

Abstract

The remnant phase of a radio galaxy is characterized by the cessation of active galactic nuclei activity, resulting in the jets ceasing to feed plasma to the radio lobes. In this paper, we present a search for and the characterization of remnant candidates in a 12.5 deg ^2 area of the XMM-Newton Large-Scale Structure field, using deep radio observations at 325 MHz from the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope, at 150 MHz from the LOw Frequency ARray, at 1.4 GHz from the Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and at 3 GHz from the VLA Sky Survey. By using both morphological criteria, i.e., undetected radio core as well as spectral criteria, i.e., high spectral curvature and ultra-steep spectrum, we identify 21 remnant candidates that are found to reside mostly in non-cluster environments, and exhibit diverse properties in terms of morphology, spectral index ( ${\alpha }_{150}^{1400}$ in the range of −1.71 to −0.75 with a median of −1.10), and linear radio size (ranging from 242 kpc–1.3 Mpc with a median of 469 kpc). Our study attempts to identify remnant candidates down to the flux density limit of 6.0 mJy at 325 MHz, and yields an upper limit on the remnant fraction ( f _rem ) to be around 5%. The observed f _rem seems consistent with the predictions of an evolutionary model assuming power-law distributions of the duration of the active phase and jet kinetic power with an index of −0.8 to −1.2.

Keywords

• Radio galaxies
• Active galactic nuclei
• Radio jets
• Radio active galactic nuclei