AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 55 Shocks and Flows within Galaxy Clusters
Oral, Monday, 2:30-4:00pm, January 9, 2006, Wilson A/B

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[55.03] AGN Heating of Cooling Flow Clusters: The Failure of Simple Hydrodynamical Models

J. C. Vernaleo, C. S. Reynolds (University of Maryland, College Park)

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) have an impact on large scale structure and galaxy formation. Most work indicates that they can provide enough energy to offset the cooling in the cores of rich, relaxed clusters. We have done a set of high resolution, three dimensional simulations. These show that in the case of purely hydrodynamical AGN jets, although there is enough energy present to offset cooling on average, it is not spatially deposited in a way that can prevent catastrophic cooling of the cluster. We conclude that either some other physics (e.g., plasma transport processes or cosmic ray heating) is relevant for thermalizing the AGN energy output, or the role of AGN heating of cluster gas has been overestimated. This work was partly funded by the Chandra Cycle-5 Theory & Modelling program under grant TM4-5007X.


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