Results 1 -
1 of
1
Abstract Title of Dissertation: Hydrodynamic Models of AGN Feedback in Cooling Core Clusters
, 2008
"... X-ray observations show that the Intra Cluster Medium (ICM) in many galaxy clusters is cooling at a rapid rate, often to the point that it should have radiated away all of its energy in less than the age of the cluster. There is however a very clear lack of enough cool end products of this gas in th ..."
Abstract
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
X-ray observations show that the Intra Cluster Medium (ICM) in many galaxy clusters is cooling at a rapid rate, often to the point that it should have radiated away all of its energy in less than the age of the cluster. There is however a very clear lack of enough cool end products of this gas in the centers of the clusters. Energetic arguments indicate that Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) should be capable of heating the inner regions of clusters enough to offset the radiative cooling; truncating massive galaxy formation and solving the cooling flow problem. We present three sets of high resolution, ideal hydrodynamic simulations with the ZEUS code to test this AGN heating paradigm. For the first set of simula-tions, we study the dependence of the interaction between the AGN jets and the ICM on the parameters of the jets themselves. We present a parameter survey of two-dimensional (axisymmetric) models of back-to-back jets injected into a cluster atmosphere. We follow the passive evolution of the resulting structures. These sim-ulations fall into roughly two classes, cocoon-bounded and non-cocoon bounded. We find that the cocoon-bounded sources inject significantly more entropy into the core