Abstract
At early cosmological epochs the comoving density of radio sources was very much higher than it is at present. Here we outline a theory for the evolution of the comoving density of radio sources, based on the hypothesis that mass loss from stars flows inwards in massive galaxies to fuel nuclear activity. We use a sufficient condition for the occurrence of inflow to show thatthe critical galaxy mass above which a total outflow becomes impossible decreases towards earlier epochs. We assume that the comoving density of radio sources is proportional to the comoving density of galaxies with inflow. The predicted density evolution of the radiogalaxy phenomenon is in good agreement with observations.
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Bailey, M., MacDonald, J. Density evolution of radio sources fuelled by stellar mass loss. Nature 289, 659–661 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1038/289659a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/289659a0
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