Issue |
A&A
Volume 699, July 2025
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A338 | |
Number of page(s) | 16 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202453559 | |
Published online | 16 July 2025 |
Complex morphology and precession indicators of active galactic nuclei jets in LoTSS DR2
1
Battcock Centre for Experimental Astrophysics, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, JJ Thompson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, United Kingdom
2
Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, United Kingdom
3
Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 NL-2333CA Leiden, The Netherlands
4
GEPI & ORN, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, 5 Place Jules Janssen, 92190 Meudon, France
5
Department of Physics & Electronics, Rhodes University, PO Box 94 Grahamstown 6140, South Africa
6
ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Oude Hoogeveensedijk 4, 7991 PD Dwingeloo, The Netherlands
⋆ Corresponding author: mah241@cam.ac.uk
Received:
20
December
2024
Accepted:
24
April
2025
The LOw Frequency ARray Two-metre Sky Survey second data release (LoTSS DR2) covers 27% of the northern sky and contains around four million radio sources. The development of this catalogue involved a large citizen science project (Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFAR), and more than 116 000 resolved sources went through visual inspection. We took a subset of sources with a flux density above 75 mJy and an angular size of 90″ or greater, yielding a total of 9985 sources, or ∼10% of the visually inspected sources. We classified these by visual inspection in terms of broad source type (e.g. Fanaroff-Riley class I or II, narrow or wide-angle tail, relaxed double), noticeable features (wings, visible jets, banding, filaments), environmental features (cluster environment, merger, diffuse emission). Our specific aim was to search for features linked to jet precession, such as a misaligned jet axis, curvature, and multiple hotspots. This combination of features and morphology allowed us to detect increasingly fine-grained sub-populations of interesting or unusual sources. We find that 28% of sources show evidence of one or more precession indicators, which could make them candidates for hosting close binary supermassive black holes. Potential precession signatures occur in sources of all sizes and luminosities in our sample but appear to favour more massive host galaxies. Our work greatly expands the sample size and parameter space of searches for precession signatures in powerful jetted sources. This work also showcases the diversity of large bright radio sources in the LOFAR surveys, whether or not precession indicators are present.
Key words: black hole physics / gravitation / galaxies: active / galaxies: general / galaxies: jets / radio continuum: galaxies
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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