2003/07/31 by Henrik Omma, James Binney, Greg L. Bryan +2 · 10 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Adaptive mesh refinement #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Cluster (spacecraft) #Cooling flow #Flow (mathematics) #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Mechanics #Mixing (physics) #Physics #Radiative cooling #Vortex #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2004.07382.x
published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.348:1105,2004 · 16 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Revised version taking referee's comments into account, minor changes. High-resolution version and MPEGs can be found at http://www.clusterheating.org/papers.php
arxiv created 2003/11/11 · openalex publication_date 2004/03/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Active galactic nuclei are clearly heating gas in ‘cooling flows’. The effectiveness and spatial distribution of the heating are controversial. We use three-dimensional simulations on adaptive grids to study the impact on a cooling flow of weak, subrelativistic jets. The simulations show cavities and vortex rings as in the observations. The cavities are fast-expanding dynamical objects rather than buoyant bubbles as previously modelled, but shocks still remain extremely hard to detect with X-rays. At late times the cavities turn into overdensities that strongly excite the g modes of a cluster. These modes damp on a long time-scale. Radial mixing is shown to be an important phenomenon, but the jets weaken the metallicity gradient only very near the centre. The central entropy density is modestly increased by the jets. We use a novel algorithm to impose the jets on the simulations.