Young but fading radio sources: searching for remnants among compact steep-spectrum radio sources

Abstract

The incidence of young but fading radio sources provides important information on the life cycle of radio emission in radio-loud active galactic nuclei. Despite its importance for constraining the models of radio source evolution, there are no systematic studies of remnants in complete samples of young radio sources. We report results on the study of 18 compact steep-spectrum (CSS) radio sources, selected from the statistically complete B3-VLA CSS sample, characterized by a steep optically-thin spectrum (alpha > 1.0) and no core detection in earlier studies. Our deep multi-frequency Very Large Array (VLA), pc-scale Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), and eMERLIN observations allowed us to locate the core component in 10 objects. In 3 CSS sources there is no clear evidence of present-time active regions, suggesting they are likely in a remnant phase. Among sources with core detection, we find 3 objects that have no clear active regions (hotspots) at the edges of the radio structure, suggesting that the radio emission may have just restarted. Our results support a power-law distribution of the source ages, although the poor statistics prevents us from setting solid constraints on the percentage of remnants and restarted sources in sub-populations of radio sources.