The Difficulty of the Heating of Cluster Cooling Flows by Sound Waves and Weak Shocks

Abstract

We investigate heating of the cool core of a galaxy cluster through the dissipation of sound waves and weak shocks excited by the activities of the central active galactic nucleus (AGN). Using a weak shock theory, we show that this heating mechanism alone cannot reproduce observed temperature and density profiles of a cluster, because the dissipation length of the waves is much smaller than the size of the core and thus the wave energy is not distributed to the whole core.

6 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of "Heating vs. Cooling in Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies", August 2006, Garching (Germany)

References in corpus (6)

• On viscosity, conduction and sound waves in the intracluster medium
• Strong Turbulence in the Cool Cores of Galaxy Clusters: Can Tsunamis Solve the Cooling Flow Problem?
• Heating Cooling Flows with Weak Shock Waves
• On Heating of Cluster Cooling Flows by Sound Waves
• Can Supermassive Black Holes Sufficiently Heat Cool Cores of Galaxy Clusters?
• Simulating Astro-E2 Observations of Galaxy Clusters: the Case of Turbulent Cores Affected by Tsunamis