Uplifted cool gas and heating by mixing in cooling flows

Abstract

We analyze our earlier three-dimensional hydrodynamical numerical simulation of jet-inflated bubbles in cooling flow clusters, and find that dense gas that was not heated by the jets’ activity and that resides around the hot jet-inflated bubbles can be identified as uplifted gas as observed in some clusters. During the build up of the dense gas around the hot bubble, mixing of hot bubble gas with other regions of the intracluster medium (ICM) heats the ICM. The vortices that mix the ICM with the hot bubble gas also excite shock waves, sound waves and turbulence. Sound waves, shocks, turbulence and uplifted gas might be easier to detect than the mixing process and hence attract more attention, but we argue that the contributions of these processes to the heating of the ICM do not add up to the level of contribution of the mixing-heating process.