Morphological-based Analyses for Parameterizing Symmetry in Radio Galaxies

Abstract

The morphology of radio galaxies can provide significant clues to describe the formation and evolution of galaxies in the Universe. Here, we aim to extract the morphological parameters of radio galaxies and define symmetry criteria as some of the essential factors of their shape explanations. We employed 67 radio galaxies, which include Fanaroff–Riley type 1 and type 2 galaxies, and their radio images from the FIRST and LoTSS surveys. We developed an automatic segmentation process to extract morphological properties such as the size of objects, eccentricity, and orientation of segmented regions from data sets. Using a maximum likelihood estimator, we show that the distributions of sizes follow a power-law function with exponents of −0.39 ± 0.06 and −0.55 ± 0.05 for the FIRST and LoTSS data, respectively. We found that type 2 radio galaxies have slightly lower eccentricities than type 1. We studied the relationships between size, eccentricity, and redshift in scatter plots. The size of galaxies (kpc2) demonstrates gently growing trends with increasing eccentricity in their scatter plots. We discussed the possible effect of the redshifts of the galaxies on this result. Depending on the number of segmented regions, we defined symmetry criteria based on proximity to the center of a galaxy in the optical band, eccentricity, orientation, and the quarter (q) of appearance in the image. We found that the mean symmetry obtained for two segmented regions that mainly emerged in two quarters via the condition of ∣ q ′ − q ″ ∣ = 2 has a higher value than those obtained for other cases.