Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar - DIFFERENT DAY

Quasars and radio galaxies display great morphological variety that correlates with other properties such as spectral slope and luminosity. The unification theory for radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs) attempts to explain much of this diversity as arising from anisotropic processes that appear different because of viewing angle. We are conducting a statistical test of AGN evolutionary models in the context of the unification theory by comparing simulated data from semi-analytic models to a large observational catalog. I will discuss the compilation of the publicly-available radio/optical catalog, developed for this purpose, from several large sky surveys. The catalog has over 2 million objects detected at 20 cm, with over 20,000 detected by all four radio source surveys. Radio color-magnitude-morphology distributions for this sample show clear structure suggesting strong underlying physical correlations. Roughly one third of sources have an optical counterpart, and so can be classified as galaxy (resolved) or quasar (unresolved). Using a subset of approximately 20,000 sources detected at 92 and 20 cm, as well as optically, I am developing an AGN sample with well-understood distributions in redshift, size, luminosity, and spectral index for comparison with the AGN evolution models as a test of underlying AGN physics and the unification theory. I will discuss the current state of this project as well as future goals, including further applications of the catalog and improvements to the semi-analytic simulations.