Royal Astronomical Society | 2019 Oct 17
“Weather” in clusters of galaxies may explain a longstanding puzzle ... The scientists used sophisticated simulations to show how powerful jets from supermassive black holes are disrupted by the motion of hot gas and galaxies, preventing gas from cooling, which could otherwise form stars. ...
Typical clusters of galaxies have several thousand member galaxies, which can be very different to our own Milky Way and vary in size and shape. These systems are embedded in very hot gas known as the intracluster medium (ICM), all of which live in an unseen halo of so-called ‘dark matter’.
A large number of galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centres, and these often have high speed jets of material stretching over thousands of light years that can inflate very hot lobes in the ICM.
The researchers ... performed state-of-the-art simulations looking at the jet lobes in fine detail and the X-rays emitted as a result. The model captures the birth and cosmological evolution of the galaxy cluster, and allowed the scientists to investigate with unprecedented realism how the jets and lobes they inflate interact with a dynamic ICM. ...
AGN Jet Feedback on a Moving Mesh: Lobe Energetics and X-ray Properties
in a Realistic Cluster Environment ~ Martin A. Bourne, Debora Sijacki, Ewald Puchwein
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 490(1):343 (Nov 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz2604
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1901.11030 > 30 Jan 2019 (v1), 16 Oct 2019 (v2)