MIGHTEE: the nature of the radio-loud AGN population

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We study the nature of the faint radio source population detected in the MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) Early Science data in the COSMOS field, focusing on the properties of the radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN). Using the extensive multi-wavelength data available in the field, we are able to classify 88 per cent of the 5223 radio sources in the field with host galaxy identifications as AGN (35 per cent) or star-forming galaxies (54 per cent). We select a sample of radio-loud AGN with redshifts out to $z \sim 6$ and radio luminosities $10^{20} 1$). We discuss that both a high black hole mass and black hole spin may be necessary to launch and sustain a dominant radio jet.Peer reviewe