MOJAVE: Monitoring of Jets in AGN with VLBA Experiments. IV. The Parent Luminosity Function of Radio-Loud Blazars

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
  • 16 February 2007
Abstract
(Abridged) We use a complete sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN) selected on the basis of relativistically beamed 15 GHz radio flux density (MOJAVE: Monitoring of Jets in AGN with VLBA Experiments) to derive the parent radio luminosity function (RLF) of radio-loud blazars. We use a maximum likelihood method to fit a beamed RLF to the observed data and thereby recover the parameters of the intrinsic RLF. We obtain a good fit to the observed data (consisting of 97 radio-loud quasars, 22 BL Lacs and 3 FR II radio galaxies) using a single power law intrinsic RLF with index alpha = -2.553 and a pure density evolution function. We find that an apparent break in the observed MOJAVE RLF arises from binning across a steep and strongly evolving RLF, and does not reflect an intrinsic property of the RLF. The estimated space density of the parent population of the MOJAVE sample (with L>1.3e25 W Hz) is \~1700/Gpc^3, in reasonable agreement with previous estimates of the space density of FR II radio galaxies.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: