Quasar emission lines, radio structures and radio unification

Abstract

Unified schemes of radio sources, which account for different types of radio active galactic nucleus in terms of anisotropic radio and optical emission, together with different orientations of the ejection axis to the line of sight, have been invoked for many years. Recently, large samples of optical quasars, mainly from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), together with large radio samples, such as Faint Images of theRadio Sky at Twenty cm(FIRST), have become available. These hold the promise of providing more stringent tests of unified schemes but, compared to previous samples, lack high-resolution radio maps. Nevertheless, they have been used to investigate unified schemes, in some cases yielding results which appear inconsistent with such theories. Here we investigate using simulations how the selection effects to which such investigations are subject can influence the conclusions drawn. In particular, we find that the effects of limited resolution do not allow core-dominated radio sources to be fully represented in the samples, that the effects of limited sensitivity systematically exclude some classes of sources and the lack of deep radio data make it difficult to decide to what extent closely separated radio sources are associated. Nevertheless, we conclude that relativistic unified schemes are entirely compatible with the current observational data. For a sample selected from SDSS and FIRST which includes weak-cored triples we find that the equivalent width of the [O III] emission line decreases as core dominance increases, as expected, and also that core-dominated quasars are optically brighter than weak-cored quasars. © 2012 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.