Paul Wiita
The College of New Jersey
Combining Optical and Radio Catalogs to Test Active Galactic Nuclei Unification
After reviewing some key properties of AGN, I will show how we can test the
strength of the orientation-based unification paradigm through the large
numbers of radio quasars present in both the SDSS optical and FIRST radio
surveys. This sample of 4714 radio quasars is over an order of magnitude
larger than any such available heretofore and allows much stronger tests of
correlations between line strengths and shapes and radio morphologies.
Our conclusions include: radio quasars with unresolved core morphologies
are redder than radio quiet quasars, but other radio loud morphologies
are not redder; the radio core-to-lobe ratio and the radio-to-optical
ratio of the quasar core are both correlated and should act as orientation
indicators; the rest equivalent widths of several lines correlate strongly
and positively with the radio/optical ratio, but in contrast to earlier
results, we don't see such EW correlations with the radio core/lobe ratio.
However, this orientation indicator-equivalent width correlation is the
opposite expected from commonly accepted orientation based theories.