The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a next-generation radio telescope that will allow us to detect sources with very faint radio emission. This includes ‘radio-quiet’ quasars (RQQs), which are supermassive black-holes that accrete material very efficiently and produce low levels of radio emission. These black holes reside in host galaxies, whose star-formation processes are thought to be the origin of this emission. However, black-hole accretion also produces radio emission, and recent work argues that this process actually dominates the emission in RQQs. In this project we will investigate the significance of this accretion component, in terms of its fraction of the total emission across all faint radio sources (i.e. normal star-forming galaxies, without an accreting black-hole at the centre, in addition to RQQs).
How ‘radio-quiet’ quasars contribute to the total radio emission from all faint sources
