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Session 12 - Radio Galaxies, VLBI.
Display session, Monday, January 15
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
Powerful extended classical double radio sources are thought to be powered by a highly collimated outflow from an active galactic nucleus (AGN). An important parameter is the beam power or rate at which energy leaves the AGN in the form of a highly collimated outflow and is deposited in the vicinity of the radio hot spot and lobe. This drives a strong shock front into the ambient medium. Important parameters, such as the beam power, may be estimated using the radio properties of the lobe and bridge since these are related to the properties of the shock front. However, this requires detailed multifrequency radio observations of the radio lobes and bridge of the source.
There are 2 samples in the published literature with enough radio information to be able to estimate the beam power of very powerful classical double sources; these are the samples of Leahy, Muxlow, and Stephens (1989) and Liu, Pooley, and Riley (1992). Using these samples we were able to estimate beam powers of 14 radio lobes from 8 radio loud quasars, and 27 radio lobes from 14 radio galaxies. The beam powers for these sources will be presented, and differences between radio loud quasars and radio galaxies will be discussed. The relation between the beam power and several quantities such as the radio power, the lobe propagation velocity, the source size, and the source redshift will be presented.
The beam power is one of the important ingredients of the characteristic source size that allows classical doubles to be used as a cosmological tool (see the paper of Daly and Guerra at this meeting). The application of the beam power for this purpose will also be discussed.
