RATAN-600 - VLA - BTA-6m ("BIG TRIO") Project: multicolour studying of distant radio galaxies

Abstract

Powerful radio galaxies belong to the population of massive stellar systems that can be picked at high redshifts. With measured redshift, morphology and age determination these objects can help greatly in understanding of the way of formation and evolution of giant elliptical galaxies with massive Black Holes in the Early Universe. We presents some recent results of study of the sample of 105 faint steep spectrum radio sources from RATAN-600 RC catalogue. All the objects has been mapped with the VLA and optical identification have been carried out with the 6m BTA telescope. Using multicolour CCD photometry in B,V,R_c,I_c bands photometric redshift and age of stellar population are estimated for a subsample of 50 FRII and CSS radio galaxies. RC J0105+0501 is a very probable candidate for radio galaxy at z ~ 3.5. Distribution of objects on colour-colour and magnitude-redshift diagrams shows a rough agreement with expectations of theoretical models of SED evolution for giant elliptical galaxies. On the [m_R - z_{phot}] diagram two populations of faint (m_R = 22^m-24^m) radio galaxies are possibly revealed. The first population at z~ 1 consists of mainly old (a half with age >= 5 Gyr) and large (LAS~20") objects, the second one at z = 1.5 - 3.5 includes both younger (<= 3 Gyr) and smaller (LAS ~ 5") objects. There are 12 more faint or still undetected (m_R >= 24.5^m) sources in the sample which may presumably be a very distant radio galaxies (z>3.5) or intermediate redshift old or dusty ones.