Mechanical AGN feedback: controlling the thermodynamical evolution of elliptical galaxies
By M. Gaspari, F. Brighenti, P. Temi. 2012
137 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A fundamental gap in the current understanding of galaxies concerns the thermodynamical evolution of ordinary, baryonic matter. On the one hand, radiative emission drastically decreases the thermal energy content of the interstellar plasma (ISM), inducing a slow cooling flow towards the centre. On the other hand, the active galactic nucleus (AGN) struggles to prevent the runaway cooling catastrophe, injecting huge amount of energy into the ISM. The present study intends to investigate thoroughly the role of mechanical AGN feedback in (isolated or massive) elliptical galaxies, extending and completing the mass range of tested cosmic environments. Our previously successful feedback models in galaxy clusters and groups demonstrated that AGN outflows, self-regulated by cold gas accretion, are able to quench the cooling flow properly without destroying the cool core. Via three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations (flash 3.3), also including stellar evolution, we show that massive mechanical AGN outflows can indeed solve the cooling-flow problem for the entire life of the galaxy, at the same time reproducing typical observational features and constraints such as buoyant underdense bubbles, elliptical shock cocoons, sonic ripples, dredge-up of metals, subsonic turbulence and extended filamentary or nuclear cold gas. In order to avoid overheating and totally emptying the isolated galaxy, the frequent mechanical AGN feedback should be less powerful and efficient (e∼ 10−4) compared with the heating required for more massive and bound ellipticals surrounded by the intragroup medium (e∼ 10−3).
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a670b93e6d6b1ba21c836119b1ada3cd03b7451
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Citations in the corpus
- Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “However, momentum feedback can more effectively push the surrounding gas and may be equally important for controlling the growth of the black hole and switching off star formation (King 2003, 2005, 2010; Ostriker et al. 2010; Debuhr et al. 2010; Silk 2013).”
- Raining on black holes and massive galaxies: the top-down multiphase condensation model (2016, methodology): “Below tcool(r)/tff(r) 10, TI may grow non-linear (Gaspari et al. 2012b; McCourt et al. 2012; Sharma et al. 2012; for classic TI studies see Field 1965; Krolik & London 1983; Nulsen 1986; Balbus & Soker 1989; Pizzolato & Soker 2005), albeit such radial threshold appears crude in real perturbed…”
- Radio galaxies and feedback from AGN jets (2020, background): “stable gas cooling is triggered under conditions related to the ratio of cooling to free-fall time (e.g., Sharma et al., 2012; McCourt et al., 2012; Gaspari et al., 2012; Voit et al., 2015), leading to the condensation of clumps of cold material that ‘rain’ onto the central AGN, los-”
- The multi-phase winds of Markarian 231: from the hot, nuclear, ultra-fast wind to the galaxy-scale, molecular outflow (2015, result): “IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany) and IGN (Spain), and with Chandra and NuSTAR observatories. massive star forming galaxies (SFG, Granato et al. 2001, 2004, Di Matteo et al. 2005, Menci et al. 2006, 2008, Bower et al. 2006, Croton et al. 2006).”
- Relativistic jet feedback – III. Feedback on gas discs (2018, background): “The role of jets from from supermassive black holes has largely been considered in the context of maintenance mode feedback (Gaspari et al. 2012b,a; Yang & Reynolds 2016).”
- AGN wind scaling relations and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies (2017, background): “Thus, a multiphase gas structure naturally develops in cluster cores and within the BCGs leading to AGN feedback triggered by cold accretion (Gaspari et al. 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017).”
- Chaotic cold accretion on to black holes (2013, methodology): “…(elaborated in more detail in the following sections) provides a basis for the subgrid modelling based on cold feedback, which has been previously shown to be extremely efficient in selfregulating the thermodynamical evolution of galaxies, groups and clusters (Gaspari et al. 2012c; Section 9).”