X-Ray Supercavities in the Hydra A Cluster and the Outburst History of the Central Galaxy’s Active Nucleus

By M. Wise, B. R. McNamara, P. Nulsen, John C. Houck, L. David. 2006

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A 227 ks Chandra X-ray image of the hot plasma in the Hydra A cluster has revealed an extensive cavity system. The system was created by a continuous outflow or a series of bursts from the nucleus of the central galaxy over the past 200-500 Myr. The cavities have displaced 10% of the plasma within a 300 kpc radius of the central galaxy, creating a swiss-cheese-like topology in the hot gas. The surface brightness decrements are consistent with empty cavities oriented within 40° of the plane of the sky. The outflow has deposited upward of 1061 ergs into the cluster gas, most of which was propelled beyond the inner ~100 kpc cooling region. The supermassive black hole has accreted at a rate of approximately 0.1-0.25 M☉ yr-1 over this time frame, which is a small fraction of the Eddington rate of a ~109 M☉ black hole, but is dramatically larger than the Bondi rate. Given the previous evidence for a circumnuclear disk of cold gas in Hydra A, these results are consistent with the AGN being powered primarily by infalling cold gas. The cavity system is shadowed perfectly by 330 MHz radio emission. Such low-frequency synchrotron emission may be an excellent proxy for X-ray cavities and thus the total energy liberated by the supermassive black hole.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93f3ced6a62ea86698f06b58071ec25e6a7d7380

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Citations in the corpus

A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AGN JET POWER AND RADIO POWER (2010, background): “On average, shock energy is a modest correction toPcav, factor of a few in clusters, but the incidence and variety of AGN driven shocks is broad (e.g.Kraft et al. 2003; Wise et al. 2007).”
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTENDED Hα FILAMENTS IN COOLING FLOW CLUSTERS (2010, background): “Wise et al. (2007) present a summary of the X-ray and radio properties of this cluster, showing the excellent correlation between the radio jets and the X-ray cavities.”
Heating Hot Atmospheres with Active Galactic Nuclei (2007, background): “The cavities in these systems occupy between 5% and 10% of the volume within 300 kpc giving the hot ICM a Swiss cheese-like topology (Wise et al. 2007).”
DRIVING OUTFLOWS WITH RELATIVISTIC JETS AND THE DEPENDENCE OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FEEDBACK EFFICIENCY ON INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM INHOMOGENEITY (2012, methodology): “Well-studied nearby examples include the Hydra A (Wise et al. 2007), Perseus A (Fabian et al. 2006), and M87 in the Virgo Cluster (Million et al. 2010), and the phenomenon is well reproduced in cluster-scale grid-based hydrodynamic simulations by Gaspari et al. (2012), Dubois et al. (2010, 2011),…”
Broad emission lines for a negatively spinning black hole (2010, background): “Observations of cavities in nearby galaxy clusters are also evidence for spin evolution (Wise et al. 2007; Fabian et al. 2000).”