Radio Galaxies in Cooling Cores

Abstract

A currently active radio galaxy sits at the center of almost every strong cooling core. What effect does it have on the cooling core? Could its effect be strong enough to offset the radiative cooling which should be occuring in these cores? In order to answer these questions we need to know how much energy the radio jet carries to the cooling core; but we have no way to measure the jet power directly. We therefore need to understand how the radio source evolves with time, and how it radiates, in order to use the data to determine the jet power. When some simple models are compared to the data, we learn that cluster-center radio galaxies probably are energetically important -- but not necessarily dominant -- in cooling cores.