AGN jet feedback on a moving mesh: cocoon inflation, gas flows and turbulence

Abstract

In many observed galaxy clusters, jets launched by the accretion process onto supermassive black holes, inflate large scale cavities filled with energetic, relativistic plasma. This process is thought to be responsible for regulating cooling losses, thus moderating the inflow of gas onto the central galaxy, quenching further star formation and maintaining the galaxy in a red and dead state. In this paper, we implement a new jet feedback scheme into the moving mesh-code AREPO, contrast different jet injection techniques and demonstrate the validity of our implementation by comparing against simple analytical models. We find that jets can significantly affect the intracluster medium (ICM), offset the overcooling through a number of heating mechanisms, as well as drive turbulence, albeit within the jet lobes only. Jet-driven turbulence is, however, a largely ineffective heating source and is unlikely to dominate the ICM heating budget even if the jet lobes efficiently fill the cooling region, as it contains at most only a few percent of the total injected energy. We instead show that the ICM gas motions, generated by orbiting substructures, while inefficient at heating the ICM, drive large scale turbulence and when combined with jet feedback, result in line-of-sight velocities and velocity dispersions consistent with the Hitomi observations of the Perseus cluster.