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Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

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The ‘cartoon view’ of a typical radio galaxy structure conta<strong>in</strong>s a bright core from<br />

which emanate two jets of radio emitt<strong>in</strong>g material which term<strong>in</strong>ate <strong>in</strong> two large radio<br />

lobes. (Figure 1.1 shows such a cartoon view). Two classes of radio galaxy were<br />

def<strong>in</strong>ed by Fanaroff & Riley (1974) based on the morphology of the radio emission.<br />

Fanaroff-Riley Class I galaxies (FR-Is) are brightest at the <strong>in</strong>ner jets, with emission<br />

that becomes gradually fa<strong>in</strong>ter out <strong>in</strong>to the radio lobes, while <strong>in</strong> the more powerful<br />

FR-II galaxies, hot spots at the outer edges of the radio lobes dom<strong>in</strong>ate the emission.<br />

Owen & Ledlow (1997) present observations of many radio galaxies, illustrat<strong>in</strong>g of<br />

course that there are many <strong>in</strong>adequacies <strong>in</strong> such a simplified viewpo<strong>in</strong>t; <strong>in</strong> Figure 1.2<br />

we present examples of a typical FR-I <strong>and</strong> FR-II galaxy from their sample.<br />

<strong>Radio</strong> galaxies belong to the class of galaxies that have Active Galactic Nuclei<br />

(AGN) which are characterized by large energy outputs from very small regions <strong>in</strong><br />

their cores. Commonly, the ‘Unified Scheme’ (Urry & Padovani, 1995) is used to<br />

expla<strong>in</strong> different properties of the different types of AGN <strong>and</strong> the connections between<br />

them, pr<strong>in</strong>cipally by observ<strong>in</strong>g the model from vary<strong>in</strong>g orientations. A representation<br />

of an AGN accord<strong>in</strong>g to the unified scheme is shown <strong>in</strong> Figure 1.3. Various types of<br />

AGN <strong>and</strong> their properties are listed <strong>in</strong> Table 1.1. The type of AGN <strong>and</strong> host galaxy<br />

are also l<strong>in</strong>ked, radio galaxies be<strong>in</strong>g almost exclusively found <strong>in</strong> early-type (elliptical<br />

or S0) galaxies.<br />

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