Impact of active galactic nucleus feedback modes on the turbulent properties of the multiphase intracluster medium

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Bologna, Via Gobetti 93/2, 40129 Bologna, Italy
² INAF – Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna, Via Gobetti 93/3, 40129 Bologna, Italy
³ Istituto di Radio Astronomia, INAF, Via Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy
⁴ University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

^⋆ Corresponding author: stefano.sotira@unibo.it

Received: 9 October 2024
Accepted: 25 February 2025

Abstract

The feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) plays a crucial role in regulating the thermodynamics and the dynamics of the intracluster medium (ICM). Studying the turbulent patterns of the hot and warm ionized phases may allow us to determine how these phases are involved in the AGN cycle and the amount of turbulent pressure generated by the latter. For this work we used new simulations to study the turbulent motions created by different types of AGN feedback in a cool core cluster and to predict the observable signatures with the latest X-ray telescopes (e.g., XRISM). We ran several hydrodynamic simulations with ENZO, simulating the self-regulated cycles of AGN feedback, starting from a static ICM in a cluster that represents the Perseus cluster. We studied in detail different feedback modes, from pure kinetic precessing jets to almost pure thermal feedback. Our analysis reveals that the gas velocity dispersion in the center of the cluster correlates in time with the peaks of the AGN activity. In more than 50% of the cluster evolution different feedback modalities produce the velocity dispersion observed in the Perseus cluster, while leading to distinct geometrical distributions and velocity dispersion profiles. Moreover, we do not find a significant kinematic coupling between the hot and the cold phase kinematics. We find a correlation between the AGN activity and the steepening of the velocity structure function (VSF) and that the projected 2D VSF slopes are not trivially correlated with the 3D VSF slopes. This line of research will allow us to use incoming detections of gas turbulent motions detectable by XRISM (or future instruments) to better constrain the duty cycle, energetics, and energy dissipation modalities of AGN feedback in massive clusters of galaxies.