Michael Brown (Monash)

Abstract: Some of the first radio continuum radio sources to be identified were powerful radio-loud active galactic nuclei in very massive elliptical galaxies such as M87. As radio surveys have improved over the past seven decades, an increasing fraction of massive elliptical galaxies have been found to host radio continuum sources. I will present recent work using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to search for radio continuum emission from local very massive galaxies without star formation. We find a very large fraction of very massive galaxies are radio continuum sources. However, the radio powers of these sources can vary by orders of magnitude (at fixed galaxy mass), and there are some tantalising correlations between radio power, morphology and host galaxy kinematics.