Heating of the intracluster medium by buoyant bubbles and sound waves

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) powered by the central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) play a major role in modifying the thermal properties of the intracluster medium (ICM). In this work, we implement two AGN heating models: (i) by buoyant cavities rising through stratified ICM (effervescent model) and, (ii) by viscous and conductive dissipation of sound waves (acoustic model). Our aim is to determine whether these heating models are consistent with ICM observables and if one is preferred over the other. We assume an initial entropy profile of ICM that is expected from the purely gravitational infall of the gas in the potential of the dark matter halo. We then incorporate heating, radiative cooling, and thermal conduction to study the evolution of ICM over the age of the clusters. Our results are: (i) Both the heating processes can produce comparable thermal profiles of the ICM with some tuning of relevant parameters. (ii) Thermal conduction is crucially important, even at the level of 10 per cent of the Spitzer values, in transferring the injected energy beyond the central regions, and without which the temperature/entropy profiles are unrealistically high. (iii) The required injected AGN power scales with cluster mass as Mvir1.5 for both models. (iv) The required AGN luminosity is comparable with the observed radio jet power, reinforcing the idea that AGNs are the dominant heating source in clusters. (v) Finally, we estimate that the fraction of the total AGN luminosity available as the AGN mechanical luminosity at 0.02 r500 is less than 0.05 per cent.