Related papers: AGN Heating through Cavities and Shocks
The cooling-flow problem is a long-standing puzzle that has received considerable recent attention, in part because the mechanism that quenches cooling flows in galaxy clusters is likely to be the same mechanism that sharply truncates the…
Shock heating by radio jets is potentially an important process in a range of environments, as it will increase the entropy of the heated gas. Although this process is expected to occur in the most powerful radio-loud AGN, strong shocks…
Observations support the view that feedback, in the form of radio outbursts from active nuclei in central galaxies, prevents catastrophic cooling of gas and rapid star formation in many groups and clusters of galaxies. Variations in jet…
Radiative cooling may plausibly cause hot gas in the centre of a massive galaxy, or galaxy cluster, to become gravitationally unstable. The subsequent collapse of this gas on a dynamical timescale can provide an abundant source of fuel for…
High resolution X-ray spectroscopy of the hot gas in galaxy clusters has shown that the gas is not cooling to low temperatures at the predicted rates of hundreds to thousands of solar masses per year. X-ray images have revealed giant…
The process that prevents the deposition of cooled gas in cooling flows must rely on feedback in order to maintain gas with short cooling times, while preventing the bulk of the gas from cooling to low temperatures. The primary candidate…
Recent observations have found extended multi-phase gas in a significant fraction of massive elliptical galaxies. We perform high-resolution three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of two idealized elliptical galaxies -- one…
Observations made during the last ten years with the Chandra X-ray Observatory have shed much light on the cooling gas in the centers of clusters of galaxies and the role of active galactic nucleus (AGN) heating. Cooling of the hot…
Radio AGN feedback is often assumed to work, but detailed physical models of this process are not well developed. This paper examines a possible path for radio AGN feedback to heat the gas in and around galaxies and perhaps suppress star…
Feedback heating from AGN in massive galaxies and galaxy clusters can be thought of as a naturally occurring control system which plays a significant role in regulating both star formation rates and the X-ray luminosity of the surrounding…
The standard cooling flow model has predicted a large amount of cool gas in the clusters of galaxies. The failure of the Chandra and XXM-Newton telescopes to detect cooling gas (below 1-2 keV) in clusters of galaxies has suggested that some…
The co-evolution between supermassive black holes and their environment is most directly traced by the hot atmospheres of dark matter halos. Cooling of the hot atmosphere supplies the central regions with fresh gas, igniting active galactic…
Most galaxies comparable to or larger than the mass of the Milky Way host hot, X-ray emitting atmospheres, and many such galaxies are radio sources. Hot atmospheres and radio jets and lobes are the ingredients of radio-mechanical active…
A fundamental gap in the current understanding of galaxies concerns the thermodynamical evolution of the ordinary, baryonic matter. On one hand, radiative emission drastically decreases the thermal energy content of the interstellar plasma…
A long-standing problem for models of galaxy formation has been the mismatch between the predicted shape of the mass function of dark matter halos and the observed shape of the luminosity function of galaxies. The number of massive halos is…
The assumption that radiative cooling of gas in the centers of galaxy clusters is approximately balanced by energy input from a central supermassive black hole implies that the observed X-ray luminosity of the cooling flow region sets a…
Unopposed radiative cooling of plasma would lead to the cooling catastrophe, a massive inflow of condensing gas, manifest in the core of galaxies, groups and clusters. The last generation X-ray telescopes, Chandra and XMM, have radically…
Radiation, winds and jets from the active nucleus of a massive galaxy can interact with its interstellar medium leading to ejection or heating of the gas. This can terminate star formation in the galaxy and stifle accretion onto the black…
We study the feedback between heating and cooling of the intra-cluster medium (ICM) in cooling flow (CF) galaxies and clusters. We adopt the popular view that the heating is due to an active galactic nucleus (AGN), i.e. a central black hole…
Jets and winds are significant channels for energy loss from accreting black holes. These outflows mechanically heat their surroundings, through shocks as well as gentler forms of heating. We discuss recent efforts to understand the nature…