English

AGN jet feedback on a moving mesh: gentle cluster heating by weak shocks and lobe disruption

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2021-06-16 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

While there is overwhelming observational evidence of AGN-driven jets in galaxy clusters and groups, if and how the jet energy is delivered to the ambient medium remains unanswered. Here we perform very high resolution AGN jet simulations within a live, cosmologically evolved cluster with the moving mesh code AREPO. We find that mock X-ray and radio lobe properties are in good agreement with observations with different power jets transitioning from FR-I to FR-II-like morphologies. During the lobe inflation phase, heating by both internal and bow shocks contributes to lobe energetics, and 40\sim 40 per cent of the feedback energy goes into the PdVPdV work done by the expanding lobes. Low power jets are more likely to simply displace gas during lobe inflation, but higher power jets become more effective at driving shocks and heating the intracluster medium (ICM), although shocks rarely exceed M23\mathcal{M}\sim 2-3. Once the lobe inflation phase ceases, cluster weather significantly impacts the lobe evolution. Lower power jet lobes are more readily disrupted and mixed with the ICM, depositing up to 70\sim 70 per cent of the injected energy, however, ultimately the equivalent of 50\gtrsim 50 per cent of the feedback energy ends up as potential energy of the system. Even though the mean ICM entropy is increased up to 8080~Myr after the jets switch off, AGN heating is gentle, inducing no large variations in cluster radial profiles in accord with observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.12784,
  title  = {AGN jet feedback on a moving mesh: gentle cluster heating by weak shocks and lobe disruption},
  author = {Martin A. Bourne and Debora Sijacki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.12784},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

29 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS