The host galaxies of radio-loud quasars at z > 5 with ALMA

¹ Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Avenida Ejercito Libertador 441, Santiago, Chile
² INAF – Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna, Via Gobetti 93/3, I-40129 Bologna, Italy
³ Max Planck Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany
⁴ Department of Astronomy, University of Geneva, Chemin Pegasi 51, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
⁵ Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
⁶ National Radio Astronomy Observatory, P.O. Box O 1011 Lopezville Road, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, 430 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
⁸ MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
⁹ Gemini Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab, 670 N A’ohoku Place, Hilo, Hawai’i 96720, USA
¹⁰ Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK
¹¹ Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 N Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
¹² Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI), The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan
¹³ Center for Data-Driven Discovery, Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan
¹⁴ Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
¹⁵ Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands

^⋆ Corresponding author; chiara.mazzucchelli@mail.udp.cl

Received: 28 June 2024
Accepted: 14 November 2024

Abstract

The interaction between radio jets and quasar host galaxies plays a paramount role in quasar and galaxy co-evolution. However, very little is known at present about this interaction at very high−z. Here, we present new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations in Bands 7 and 3 of six radio-loud (RL) quasar host galaxies at z > 5. We recovered [C II] 158 μm line and underlying dust continuum emission at > 2σ for five sources, while we obtained upper limits for the CO(6-5) emission line and continuum for the remaining source. At the spatial resolution of our observations (∼1″​​_.0–1″​​_.4), we did not recover any perturbed or extended morphologies or kinematics, which are known signatures of potential mergers. These galaxies already host large quantities of gas (∼10¹⁰ M_⊙), with [C II] luminosities of L_[C II] ∼ 10^8 − 9 L_⊙ and [C II]-based star formation rates of 30 − 400 M_⊙ yr⁻¹. In building their radio/submillimeter (radio/submm) spectral energy distributions (SEDs), we found that in at least four cases, the 1 mm continuum intensity arises from a combination of synchrotron and dust emission. The initial estimation of synchrotron contribution at 300 GHz in these cases is of ≳10%. Assuming a scenario where the continuum emission is solely due to cold dust as an upper limit, we obtained infrared (IR) luminosities of L_IR ∼ 10^{11 − 12} L_⊙. We compared the properties of the sources inspected here with a large collection of radio-quiet sources from the literature, as well as a sample of RL quasars from previous studies at comparable redshifts. We recovered a mild potential decrease in L_[C II] for the RL sources, which might be due to a suppression of the cool gas emission due to the radio jets. We did not find any [C II] emitting companion galaxy candidate around the five RL quasars observed in Band 7. Given the depth of our dataset, this result is still consistent with what has been observed around radio-quiet quasars. Future higher spatial-resolution observations, over a broader frequency range, of high−z RL quasars hosts will allow us to further improve our understanding of the physics of these sources.