Bubble-driven Gas Uplift in Galaxy Clusters and its Velocity Features

TL;DR

This paper models buoyant bubbles in galaxy clusters as rigid bodies to explain observed gas motions, filament structures, and velocity distributions, highlighting the role of eddies and jet-like streams in gas uplift.

Contribution

It introduces a novel rigid-body bubble model that accounts for long-lived bubbles and their interactions with the ICM, explaining observed features without relying on small-scale turbulence.

Findings

Eddies behind bubbles uplift gas and form filamentary structures.

Detached high-speed jets propagate toward cluster centers.

Model reproduces observed velocity structure functions of filaments.

Abstract

Buoyant bubbles of relativistic plasma are essential for active galactic nucleus feedback in galaxy clusters, stirring and heating the intracluster medium (ICM). Observations suggest that these rising bubbles maintain their integrity and sharp edges much longer than predicted by hydrodynamic simulations. In this study, we assume that bubbles can be modeled as rigid bodies and demonstrate that intact bubbles and their long-term interactions with the ambient ICM play an important role in shaping gas kinematics, forming thin gaseous structures (e.g., H$\alpha$ filaments), and generating internal waves in cluster cores. We find that well-developed eddies are formed in the wake of a buoyantly rising bubble, and it is these eddies, rather than the Darwin drift, that are responsible for most of the gas mass uplift. The eddies gradually elongate along the bubble's direction of motion due to the strong density stratification of the atmosphere and eventually detach from the bubble, quickly evolving into a high-speed jet-like stream propagating towards the cluster center. This picture naturally explains the presence of long straight and horseshoe-shaped H$\alpha$ filaments in the Perseus cluster, inward and outward motions of the gas, and the X-ray-weighted gas velocity distributions near the northwestern bubble observed by Hitomi. Our model reproduces the observed H$\alpha$ velocity structure function of filaments, providing a simple interpretation for its steep scaling and normalization: laminar gas flows and large eddies within filaments driven by the intact bubbles, rather than spatially homogeneous small-scale turbulence, are sufficient to produce a structure function consistent with observations.