MOJAVE: Monitoring of Jets in AGN with VLBA Experiments. IV. The Parent Luminosity Function of Radio‐Loud Blazars

(Abridged) We use a complete sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN) selectedon the basis of relativistically beamed 15 GHz radio flux density to derive theparent radio luminosity function (RLF) of bright radio-selected blazar cores.We use a maximum likelihood method to fit a beamed RLF to the observed data andthereby recover the parameters of the intrinsic (unbeamed) RLF. We analyze twosubsamples of the MOJAVE sample: the first contains only objects of known FR IIclass, with a total of 103 sources, and the second subsample adds 24 objects ofuncertain FR class for a total of 127 sources. Both subsamples exclude fourknown FR I radio galaxies and two gigahertz-peaked spectrum sources. We obtaingood fits to both subsamples using a single power law intrinsic RLF with puredensity evolution function. We find that a previously reported break in theobserved MOJAVE RLF actually arises from using incomplete bins (because of theluminosity cutoff) across a steep and strongly evolving RLF, and does notreflect a break in the intrinsic RLF. The derived space density of the parentpopulation of the FR II sources from the MOJAVE sample (with L>1.3e25 W/Hz) isapproximately 1600/Gpc^3.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures and 2 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ. Changes: classification of sources based on radio morphology instead of optical classes; added the parameters of the RLF of the FR II sources; added more explanations; added a table listing the sample sources; added 2 extra figures related to the observed break in the RLF; updated reference