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.