Radio-AGN activity across the galaxy population: dependence on stellar mass, star formation rate, and redshift

Abstract

We characterise the co-evolution of radio-loud AGN and their galaxies by mapping the dependence of radio-loud AGN activity on stellar mass and star-formation rate (SFR) across cosmic time (out to z ∼ 1.5). Deep LOFAR radio observations are combined with large galaxy samples to study the incidence of radio-loud AGN across the galaxy population; the AGN are further split into low-excitation radio galaxies (LERGs) and high-excitation radio galaxies (HERGs). We find that LERG activity occurs over a wide range of SFRs, whereas HERGs are typically found in galaxies with ongoing star formation. The LERGs are then split based on their SFRs relative to the main sequence, across redshift. Within quiescent galaxies, LERG activity shows a steep stellar mass dependence with the same normalisation across the past ∼ 10 Gyr; this indicates that hot gas fuels LERGs in quiescent galaxies across cosmic time. In massive galaxies ($\log _{10}(M/\rm {{\rm M}_{\odot }}) \gtrsim 11$), the incidence of LERGs is roughly constant across the galaxy population, suggesting that LERGs in massive galaxies may be fuelled by hot gas regardless of the star-formation activity. At lower masses, however, LERG activity is significantly more enhanced (by a factor of up to 10) in star-forming galaxies compared to quiescent galaxies; this suggests that an additional fuelling mechanism, likely associated with cold gas, may fuel the LERGs in galaxies with higher SFRs. We find that HERGs typically accrete above 1percnt of the Eddington-scaled accretion rate, and the LERGs typically accrete below this level.