DRIVING OUTFLOWS WITH RELATIVISTIC JETS AND THE DEPENDENCE OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FEEDBACK EFFICIENCY ON INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM INHOMOGENEITY

By Alexander Y. Wagner, G. Bicknell, Masayuki Umemura. 2012

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the detailed physics of the feedback mechanism by relativistic active galactic nucleus (AGN) jets interacting with a two-phase fractal interstellar medium (ISM) in the kpc-scale core of galaxies using 29 three-dimensional grid-based hydrodynamical simulations. The feedback efficiency, as measured by the amount of cloud dispersal generated by the jet–ISM interactions, is sensitive to the maximum size of clouds in the fractal cloud distribution but not to their volume filling factor. Feedback ceases to be efficient for Eddington ratios Pjet/Ledd ≲ 10−4, although systems with large cloud complexes ≳ 50 pc require jets of Eddington ratio in excess of 10−2 to disperse the clouds appreciably. Based on measurements of the bubble expansion rates in our simulations, we argue that sub-grid AGN prescriptions resulting in negative feedback in cosmological simulations without a multi-phase treatment of the ISM are good approximations if the volume filling factor of warm-phase material is less than 0.1 and the cloud complexes are smaller than ∼25 pc. We find that the acceleration of the dense embedded clouds is provided by the ram pressure of the high-velocity flow through the porous channels of the warm phase, flow that has fully entrained the shocked hot-phase gas it has swept up, and is additionally mass loaded by ablated cloud material. This mechanism transfers 10% to 40% of the jet energy to the cold and warm gas, accelerating it within a few 10 to 100 Myr to velocities that match those observed in a range of high- and low-redshift radio galaxies hosting powerful radio jets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c69b83d6ddc89e9ad745ec588e925c2889d7ca69

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Citations in the corpus

Relativistic jet feedback – III. Feedback on gas discs (2018, methodology): “In earlier papers (Sutherland & Bicknell 2007; Wagner & Bicknell 2011; Wagner et al. 2012; Mukherjee et al. 2016) we have simulated the interaction of a relativistic jet with a turbulent ISM.”
Quasar feedback and the origin of radio emission in radio-quiet quasars (2014, background): “In both models, the morphology of the ionized gas depends much more strongly on the distribution of the interstellar medium than on the exact driving mechanism (Gaibler et al. 2011; Wagner et al. 2012, 2013).”
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). Science Case and Survey Design (2019, background): “The nature of this AGN feedback is very much under debate: it has been shown that energy deposited by radio jets can either trigger or quench star formation (e.g., Wagner et al. 2012).”
UNLEASHING POSITIVE FEEDBACK: LINKING THE RATES OF STAR FORMATION, SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION, AND OUTFLOWS IN DISTANT GALAXIES (2013, methodology): “…simulations that are capable of resolving the Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities that control the interaction of the AGN outflows with interstellar clouds, I use jet-driven outflows (Wagner et al. 2012) and jet-triggered star formation (Gaibler et al. 2012) as my canonical case in what follows.”
Kiloparsec-scale outflows are prevalent among luminous AGN: outflows and feedback in the context of the overall AGN population (2014, background): “…(e.g., Murray et al. 2005); the interaction of radio jets (launched by the AGN) with a clumpy and multiphase ISM (e.g., Sutherland & Bicknell 2007; Wagner et al. 2012); and AGN winds, initially launched at the accretion disk, that pro agate through the galaxy and sweep up the ISM (e.g., King et…”
AGN outflows and feedback twenty years on (2018, unknown): “Furthermore, the multi-phase nature of the ISM affects the prediction of quenching efficiencies[83].”
Cool outflows in galaxies and their implications (2020, background): “Fine-tuning of the jet power, kinetic feedback efficiency, f ,k, and ISM cloud structure is therefore needed for efficient energy and momentum transfer to disperse a significant fraction of the gas in galaxies (Wagner et al. 2012; Mukherjee et al. 2016, 2018a,b).”
The fast molecular outflow in the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063 as seen by ALMA (2015, methodology): “Therefore, we present a simple model, which aims to explain these characteristics following the scenario presented in the numerical simulations of Wagner & Bicknell (2011) and Wagner et al. (2012).”