The presence and distribution of H I absorbing gas in sub-galactic sized radio sources

¹ National Radio Astronomy Observatory, PO Box O, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
² Onsala Space Observatory, 439 92 Onsala, Sweden
³ Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, Postbus 2, 7990 AA Dwingeloo, The Netherlands

Corresponding author: Y. M. Pihlström, ypihlstr@aoc.nrao.edu

Received: 14 February 2003
Accepted: 20 March 2003

Abstract

We consider the incidence of Hiabsorption in intrinsically small sub-galactic sized extragalactic sources selected from sources classified as Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) and Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) sources. We find that the smaller sources (<0.5 kpc) have larger Hicolumn densities than the larger sources (>0.5 kpc). Both a spherical and an axi-symmetric gas distribution, with a radial power law density profile, can be used to explain this anti-correlation between projected linear size and Hi column density. Since most detections occur in objects classified as galaxies, we argue that if the unified schemes apply to GPS/CSSs a disk distribution for the Hiis more likely. The most favoured explanation for the compact sizes of the GPS/CSSs is that they are young sources evolving in a power law density medium. For the GPSs with measured expansion velocities, our derived densities are within an order of magnitude of those estimated from ram-pressure confinement of the lobes assuming equipartition. Our results therefore support the youth model.