The near-infrared properties of the host galaxies of radio quasars

¹ Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany e-mail: ssanchez@aip.de
² Isaac Newton Group, Apt. 321, 38700 Santa Cruz de la Palma, Spain
³ Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA), Universidad de Cantabria-CSIC, Avd. de Los Castros S/N, 35005-Santander, Spain e-mail: gserrano@ifca.unican.es

Corresponding author: S. F. Sánchez, ssanchez@aip.de

Received: 26 July 2002
Accepted: 4 April 2003

Abstract

We present K-band images of 31 radio quasars selected from the B3-VLA quasar sample. A new method has been developed to detect and restore the host galaxies of these quasars. We have detected the host galaxies of 16 of them. Using these data together with previous data from the B3-VLA quasars (Carballo et al. [CITE], hereafter Paper I) and literature data from other samples, we have analyzed a sample of 69 hosts of radio quasars, covering a redshift range between .
The host galaxies are large ( kpc) and luminous elliptical galaxies (~75% of them brighter than ), with an evolution similar to that of radio galaxies. A significant fraction (~40%) of them shows evidence of a possible collision/merging process. They follow a -r_e relation similar to that of normal elliptical galaxies. The morphological and photometric similarities between these galaxies and radio galaxies in this wide range of redshifts is a good test of the reliability of unification schemes. All of them show little evolution from to the present epoch. Their distribution is consistent with a no-evolution model, with a fraction of the dispersion due to differences in radio power. We have found a correlation between the quasar radio power and the host luminosity. We have also found a correlation between the host and nuclear source luminosities. These correlations could be induced by a physical relation between the central black hole and the bulge mass (Magorrian et al. [CITE]).