Intergalactic Magnetic Fields from Quasar Outflows

By S. Furlanetto, Abraham Loeb. 2001

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Outflows from quasars inevitably pollute the intergalactic medium (IGM) with magnetic fields. The short-lived activity of a quasar leaves behind an expanding magnetized bubble in the IGM. We model the expansion of the remnant quasar bubbles and calculate their distribution as a function of size and magnetic field strength at different redshifts. We generically find that by a redshift z ~ 3, about 5%-20% of the IGM volume is filled by magnetic fields with an energy density ≳10% of the mean thermal energy density of a photoionized IGM (at ~104 K). As massive galaxies and X-ray clusters condense out of the magnetized IGM, the adiabatic compression of the magnetic field could result in the field strength observed in these systems without a need for further dynamo amplification. The intergalactic magnetic field could also provide a nonthermal contribution to the pressure of the photoionized gas that may account for the claimed discrepancy between the simulated and observed Doppler width distributions of the Lyα forest.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f63527db76f8d8888cb6afa2dbdcfd99e3e08f6

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Citations in the corpus

Quasar Feedback: The Missing Link in Structure Formation (2004, background): “In fact, Barkana & Loeb (2001) and Furlanetto & Loeb (2001) have constructed numerical models of outflows and solved the coupled system of differential equations to describe the outflow dynamics, modeling both the radial dependence of the density profile and accretion infall.”
Cluster Magnetic Fields (2001, methodology): “Detailed consideration of this problem (Furlanetto & Loeb 2001; Kronberg et al. 2001) using the statistics for high z QSO populations shows that by z ∼ 3, between 5% and 20% of the IGM may be permeated by fields with energy densities corresponding to ≥ 10% the thermal energy density of the…”
Evolving turbulence and magnetic fields in galaxy clusters (2005, methodology): “Another source of seed fields is likely to be the outflows from earlier generation of active galaxies (radio galaxies and quasars) (Rees 1994; Goldshmidt & Rephaeli 1994; Medina-Tanco & Enßlin 2001; Furlanetto & Loeb 2001; Colgate, Li & Pariev 2001).”
Fueling Low-Level AGN Activity through Stochastic Accretion of Cold Gas (2006, background): “…a number of simulations have shown is a surprisingly good approximation to a full solution including radiative cooling, the pressure of the external medium, magnetic and gravitational fields, and further effects, at least on galaxy (Hopkins et al. 2006c) and larger (Furlanetto & Loeb 2001) scales.”
TESTING THE NO-HAIR THEOREM WITH EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF SAGITTARIUS A* (2013, background): “This occurs both by moderating accretion of baryons into dark matter halos (i.e., feedback; for a review, see Fabian 2012) and injecting material back into the intergalactic medium (e.g., magnetic fields; Furlanetto & Loeb 2001).”
Self-regulated Growth of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxies as the Origin of the Optical and X-Ray Luminosity Functions of Quasars (2003, background): “Recent work suggests that the kinetic output of quasars may be comparable to their radiative output (see §2.1.1 in Furlanetto & Loeb 2001; Begelman 2003).”
A Physical Model for the Coevolution of QSOs and Their Spheroidal Hosts (2003, methodology): “Quasar-driven outflows have been invoked to produce an intergalactic magnetic field (Furlanetto & Loeb 2001), and to preheat the intra-cluster medium (Valageas & Silk 1999; Kravtsov & Yepes 2000; Wu et al. 2000; Bower et al. 2001; Cavaliere et al. 2002; Platania et al. 2002).”
Cosmological Magnetic Fields: Their Generation, Evolution and Observation (2013, background): “Furlanetto and Loeb (2001) discuss the possibility that magnetic fields spread by quasar outflows and find that by redshift z ∼ 3 (i.e. at the maximum of the quasar activity) some 5%-20% of the volume of the IGM might be ”polluted” by fields from quasar outflows.”
Astrophysical magnetic fields and nonlinear dynamo theory (2004, background): “Such outflows may leave behind magnetized bubbles of plasma in some fraction of the intergalactic medium (typically ∼ 10% [541]), which when incorporated into the 33 ICM would seed the general cluster gas with magnetic fields.”
Gamma Rays from Intergalactic Shocks (2002, background): “The synchrotron radio radiation above 100 MHz is subdominant to the CMB, although its strong fluctuations on subdegree scales were shown to contaminate CMB fluctuations at low ( d10 GHz) frequencies (Waxman & Loeb 2000).”
The intergalactic magnetic field constrained by Fermi/LAT observations of the TeV blazar 1ES 0229+200 (2010, background): “From the theoretical point of view, intergalactic space can contain the traces of magnetic fields produced in the initial phases of the Universe (e.g., Grasso & Rubinstein 2001) and can also be polluted by magnetic field ejectedby galaxies and quasars (e.g. Furlanetto & Loeb 2001).”
Cluster magnetic fields from galactic outflows (2008, background): “Finally, galactic winds (e.g. Völk & Atoyan 2000) or active galactic nuclei (AGN) ejecta (e.g. Enßlin et al. 1997; Furlanetto & Loeb 2001, and references therein) can produce magnetic fields and pollute the protocluster region.”