Parent population of flat-spectrum radio-loud narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies^⋆

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “G. Galilei”Università di Padova, Vicolo dell’Osservatorio 3, 35122 Padova, Italy
e-mail: marco.berton.1@studenti.unipd.it
² INAF−Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate ( LC), Italy
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University, 525 Northwestern Avenue, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
⁴ Department of Astronomy and Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University, 140 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

Received: 19 January 2015
Accepted: 9 April 2015

Abstract

Flat-spectrum radio-loud narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) are a recently discovered class of γ-ray emitting active galactic nuclei (AGN), that exhibit some blazar-like properties which are explained with the presence of a relativistic jet viewed at small angles. When blazars are observed at larger angles they appear as radio-galaxies, and we expect to observe an analogue parent population for beamed NLS1s. However, the number of known NLS1s with the jet viewed at large angles is not enough. Therefore, we tried to understand the origin of this deficit. Current hypotheses about the nature of parent sources are steep-spectrum radio-loud NLS1s, radio-quiet NLS1s and disk-hosted radio-galaxies. To test these hypotheses we built three samples of candidate sources plus a control sample, and calculated their black hole mass and Eddington ratio using their optical spectra. We then performed a Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical test to investigate the compatibility of our different samples with a beamed population. Our results indicate that, when the inclination angle increases, a beamed source appears as a steep-spectrum radio-loud NLS1, or possibly even as a disk-hosted radio-galaxy with low black hole mass and high Eddington ratio. Further investigations, involving larger complete samples and observations at radio frequency, are needed to understand the incidence of disk-hosted radio-galaxies in the parent population, and to assess whether radio-quiet NLS1s can play a role, as well.