A Wide and Deep Exploration of Radio Galaxies with Subaru HSC (WERGS). VII. Redshift Evolution of Radio Galaxy Environments at z = 0.3–1.4

Abstract

We examine the redshift evolution of density environments around 2163 radio galaxies with the stellar masses of ∼109–1012 M ⊙ between redshifts of z = 0.3–1.4, based on the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) and Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm. We use the k-nearest neighbor method to measure the local galaxy number density around our radio galaxy sample. We find that the overdensities of the radio galaxies are weakly but significantly anticorrelated with redshift. This is consistent with the known result that the relative abundance of less-massive radio galaxies increases with redshift, because less-massive radio galaxies reside in relatively low-density regions. Massive radio galaxies with stellar masses of M * > 1011 M ⊙ are found in high density environments compared with the control sample galaxies with radio nondetection and matched stellar mass. Less-massive radio galaxies with M * < 1011 M ⊙ reside in average density environments. The fraction of the radio galaxies associated with the neighbors within a typical major merger scale, <70 kpc, is higher than (comparable to) that of the control galaxies at M * > 1011 M ⊙ (M * < 1011 M ⊙). We also find that the local densities around the radio galaxies are anticorrelated with the radio luminosities and black hole mass accretion rates at a fixed stellar mass. These findings suggest that massive radio galaxies have matured through galaxy mergers in the past, and have supermassive black holes whose mass accretion almost ceased at z > 1.4, while less-massive radio galaxies undergo active accretion just at this epoch, as they have avoided such merger events.