AGN jet feedback on a moving mesh: Cocoon inflation, gas flows and turbulence
In many observed galaxy clusters, jets launched by the accretion process on to supermassive black holes, inflate large-scale cavities filled with energetic, relativistic plasma. This process is thought to be responsible for regulating cooling losses, thus moderating the inflow of gas on to the central galaxy, quenching further star formation and maintaining the galaxy in a red and dead state. In this paper, we implement a new jet feedback scheme into the moving mesh-code AREPO, contrast different jet injection techniques and demonstrate the validity of our implementation by comparing against simple analytical models. We find that jets can significantly affect the intracluster medium (ICM), offset the overcooling through a number of heating mechanisms, as well as drive turbulence, albeit within the jet lobes only. Jet-driven turbulence is, however, a largely ineffective heating source and is unlikely to dominate the ICM heating budget even if the jet lobes efficiently fill the cooling region, as it contains at most only a few per cent of the total injected energy. We instead show that the ICM gas motions, generated by orbiting substructures, while inefficient at heating the ICM, drive largescale turbulence and when combined with jet feedback, result in line-of-sight velocities and velocity dispersions consistent with the Hitomi observations of the Perseus cluster.
Item Type | Article |
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Identification Number | 10.1093/MNRAS/STX2269 |
Additional information | © 2017 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, to view a copy of the license, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords | black hole physics -methods: numerical, galaxies: active, galaxies: clusters: general, galaxies: clusters: intracluster medium, galaxies: jets, astronomy and astrophysics, space and planetary science |
Date Deposited | 17 Oct 2025 13:27 |
Last Modified | 18 Oct 2025 01:12 |