Heating and cooling in the Perseus cluster core

Abstract

It is well known that the radiative cooling time of the hot X-ray emitting gas in the cores of most clusters of galaxies is less than 10^10 yr. In many clusters the gas temperature also drops towards the centre. If we draw a causal connection between these two properties then we infer the presence of a cooling flow onto the central galaxy. High spectral resolution XMM-Newton data and high spatial resolution Chandra data, show however a lack of X-ray emitting gas below about one third of the cluster virial temperature. The explanation is that some form of heating balances cooling. The smoothness and similarity of the cooling time profiles and the flatness of the required heating profiles all indicate that we must seek a relatively gentle, quasi-continuous (on timescales <10^8 yr), distributed heat source. The likely such source is the central black hole and its powerful jets which create bubble-like cavities in the inner hot gas. We briefly review the general heating and cooling statistics in an X-ray bright sample of cluster before we discuss the detailed situation in the Perseus cluster, the X-ray brightest cluster in the Sky.