The living standards of families with children reporting low incomes

The Government has high-profile child poverty targets which are assessed using a measure of income, as recorded in the Household Below Average Income series (HBAI). However, income is an imperfect measure of living standards. Previous analysis suggests that some children in households with low income do not have commensurately low living standards. This report aims to document the extent to which this is true, focusing on whether children in low-income households have different living standards depending on whether their parents are employed, self-employed, or workless

Optical spectroscopy of faint gigahertz peaked spectrum sources

We present spectroscopic observations of a sample of faint Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio sources drawn from the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS). Redshifts have been determined for 19 (40%) of the objects. The optical spectra of the GPS sources identified with low redshift galaxies show deep stellar absorption features. This confirms previous suggestions that their optical light is not significantly contaminated by AGN-related emission, but is dominated by a population of old (>9 Gyr) and metal-rich (>0.2 [Fe/H]) stars, justifying the use of these (probably) young radio sources as probes of galaxy evolution. The optical spectra of GPS sources identified with quasars are indistinguishable from those of flat spectrum quasars, and clearly different from the spectra of Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) quasars. The redshift distribution of the GPS quasars in our radio-faint sample is comparable to that of the bright samples presented in the literature, peaking at z ~ 2-3. It is unlikely that a significant population of low redshift GPS quasars is missed due to selection effects in our sample. We therefore claim that there is a genuine difference between the redshift distributions of GPS galaxies and quasars, which, because it is present in both the radio-faint and bright samples, can not be due to a redshift-luminosity degeneracy. It is therefore unlikely that the GPS quasars and galaxies are unified by orientation, unless the quasar opening angle is a strong function of redshift. We suggest that the GPS quasars and galaxies are unrelated populations and just happen to have identical observed radio-spectral properties, and hypothesise that GPS quasars are a sub-class of flat spectrum quasars.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages. Accepted by MNRAS. For related papers see http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~snelle

WFPC2 LRF Imaging of Emission Line Nebulae in 3CR Radio Galaxies

We present HST/WFPC2 Linear Ramp Filter images of high surface brightness emission lines (either [OII], [OIII], or H-alpha+[NII]) in 80 3CR radio sources. We overlay the emission line images on high resolution VLA radio images (eight of which are new reductions of archival data) in order to examine the spatial relationship between the optical and radio emission. We confirm that the radio and optical emission line structures are consistent with weak alignment at low redshift (z < 0.6) except in the Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) radio galaxies where both the radio source and the emission line nebulae are on galactic scales and strong alignment is seen at all redshifts. There are weak trends for the aligned emission line nebulae to be more luminous, and for the emission line nebula size to increase with redshift and/or radio power. The combination of these results suggests that there is a limited but real capacity for the radio source to influence the properties of the emission line nebulae at these low redshifts (z < 0.6). Our results are consistent with previous suggestions that both mechanical and radiant energy are responsible for generating alignment between the radio source and emission line gas.Comment: 80 pages, 54 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

Observations of HI Absorbing Gas in Compact Radio Sources at Cosmological Redshifts

We present an overview of the occurrence and properties of atomic gas associated with compact radio sources at redshifts up to z=0.85. Searches for HI 21cm absorption were made with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope at UHF-high frequencies (725-1200 MHz). Detections were obtained for 19 of the 57 sources with usable spectra (33%). We have found a large range in line depths, from tau=0.16 to tau<=0.001. There is a substantial variety of line profiles, including Gaussians of less than 10km/s, to more typically 150km/s, as well as irregular and multi-peaked absorption profiles, sometimes spanning several hundred km/s. Assuming uniform coverage of the entire radio source, we obtain column depths of atomic gas between 1e19 and 3.3e21(Tsp/100K)(1/f)cm^(-2). There is evidence for significant gas motions, but in contrast to earlier results at low redshift, there are many sources in which the HI velocity is substantially negative (up to v=-1420km/s) with respect to the optical redshift, suggesting that in these sources the atomic gas, rather than falling into the centre, may be be flowing out, interacting with the jets, or rotating around the nucleus.Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication in A&

The MURALES survey II. Presentation of MUSE observations of 20 3C low-z radio galaxies and first results

We present observations of a complete sub-sample of 20 radio galaxies from the Third Cambridge Catalog (3C) with redshift <0.3 obtained from VLT/MUSE optical integral field spectrograph. These data have been obtained as part of the survey MURALES (a MUse RAdio Loud Emission line Snapshot survey) with the main goal of exploring the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) feedback process in a sizeable sample of the most powerful radio sources at low redshift. We present the data analysis and, for each source, the resulting emission line images and the 2D gas velocity field. Thanks to their unprecedented depth (the median 3 sigma surface brightness limit in the emission line maps is 6X10^-18 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2, these observations reveal emission line structures extending to several tens of kiloparsec in most objects. In nine sources the gas velocity shows ordered rotation, but in the other cases it is highly complex. 3C sources show a connection between radio morphology and emission line properties. Whereas, in three of the four Fanaroff and Riley Class I radio galaxies (FRIs), the line emission regions are compact, ~1 kpc in size; in all but one of the Class II radiogalaxies FRIIs, we detected large scale structures of ionized gas with a median extent of 17 kpc. Among the FRIIs, those of high and low excitation show extended gas structures with similar morphological properties, suggesting that they both inhabit regions characterized by a rich gaseous environment on kpc scale.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

High Frequency Peakers: young radio sources or flaring blazars?

We present new, simultaneous, multifrequency observations of 45 out of the 55 candidate High Frequency Peakers (HFP) selected by Dallacasa et al. (2000), carried out 3 to 4 years after a first set of observations. Our sub-sample consists of 10 galaxies, 28 stellar objects (``quasars'') and 7 unidentified sources. Both sets of observations are sensitive enough to allow the detection of variability at the 10% level or lower. While galaxies do not show significant variability, most quasars do. Seven of them no longer show the convex spectrum which is the defining property of Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS)/HFP sources and are interpreted as blazars caught by Dallacasa et al. (2000) during a flare, when a highly self-absorbed component dominated the emission. In general, the variability properties (amplitude, timescales, correlation between peak luminosity and peak frequency of the flaring component) of the quasar sub-sample resemble those of blazars. We thus conclude that most HFP candidates identified with quasars may well be flaring blazars.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic