The co-evolution between supermassive black holes and their environment is most directly traced by the hot atmospheres of dark matter halos. Cooling of the hot atmosphere supplies the central regions with fresh gas, igniting active galactic nuclei (A
GN) with long duty cycles. Outflows from the central engine tightly couple with the surrounding gaseous medium and provide the dominant heating source preventing runaway cooling by carving cavities and driving shocks across the medium. The AGN feedback loop is a key feature of all modern galaxy evolution models. Here we review our knowledge of the AGN feedback process in the specific context of galaxy groups. Galaxy groups are uniquely suited to constrain the mechanisms governing the cooling-heating balance. Unlike in more massive halos, the energy supplied by the central AGN to the hot intragroup medium can exceed the gravitational binding energy of halo gas particles. We report on the state-of-the-art in observations of the feedback phenomenon and in theoretical models of the heating-cooling balance in galaxy groups. We also describe how our knowledge of the AGN feedback process impacts on galaxy evolution models and on large-scale baryon distributions. Finally, we discuss how new instrumentation will answer key open questions on the topic.
Galaxy groups and poor clusters are more common than rich clusters, and host the largest fraction of matter content in the Universe. Hence, their studies are key to understand the gravitational and thermal evolution of the bulk of the cosmic matter.
Moreover, because of their shallower gravitational potential, galaxy groups are systems where non-gravitational processes (e.g., cooling, AGN feedback, star formation) are expected to have a higher impact on the distribution of baryons, and on the general physical properties, than in more massive objects, inducing systematic departures from the expected scaling relations. Despite their paramount importance from the astrophysical and cosmological point of view, the challenges in their detection have limited the studies of galaxy groups. Upcoming large surveys will change this picture, reassigning to galaxy groups their central role in studying the structure formation and evolution in the Universe, and in measuring the cosmic baryonic content. Here, we review the recent literature on various scaling relations between X-ray and optical properties of these systems, focusing on the observational measurements, and the progress in our understanding of the deviations from the self-similar expectations on groups scales. We discuss some of the sources of these deviations, and how feedback from supernovae and/or AGNs impacts the general properties and the reconstructed scaling laws. Finally, we discuss future prospects in the study of galaxy groups.
We present optical follow-up observations for candidate clusters in the Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight (CHiPS) survey, which is designed to find new galaxy clusters with extreme central galaxies that were misidentified as bright isolated sources in t
he ROSAT All-Sky Survey catalog. We identify 11 cluster candidates around X-ray, radio, and mid-IR bright sources, including six well-known clusters, two false associations of foreground and background clusters, and three new candidates which are observed further with Chandra. Of the three new candidates, we confirm two newly discovered galaxy clusters: CHIPS1356-3421 and CHIPS1911+4455. Both clusters are luminous enough to be detected in the ROSAT All Sky-Survey data if not because of their bright central cores. CHIPS1911+4455 is similar in many ways to the Phoenix cluster, but with a highly-disturbed X-ray morphology on large scales. We find the occurrence rate for clusters that would appear to be X-ray bright point sources in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (and any surveys with similar angular resolution) to be 2+/-1%, and the occurrence rate of clusters with runaway cooling in their cores to be <1%, consistent with predictions of Chaotic Cold Accretion. With the number of new groups and clusters predicted to be found with eROSITA, the population of clusters that appear to be point sources (due to a central QSO or a dense cool core) could be around 2000. Finally, this survey demonstrates that the Phoenix cluster is likely the strongest cool core at z<0.7 -- anything more extreme would have been found in this survey.
Clusters of galaxies, the largest collapsed structures in the Universe, are located at the intersection of extended filaments of baryons and dark matter. Cosmological accretion onto clusters through large scale filaments adds material at cluster outs
kirts. Kinetic energy in the form of bulk motions and turbulence due to this accretion provides a form of pressure support against gravity, supplemental to thermal pressure. Significant amount of non-thermal pressure support could bias cluster masses derived assuming hydrostatic equilibrium, the primary proxy for cluster cosmology studies. Sensitive measurements of Doppler broadening and shift of astrophysical lines, and the relative fluctuations in thermodynamical quantities (e.g., density, pressure, and entropy) are primary diagnostic tools. Forthcoming planned and proposed X-ray (with large etendue, throughput, and high spectral resolution) and SZ observatories will provide crucial information on the assembly and virialisation processes of clusters, involving turbulent eddies cascading at various spatial scales and larger gas bulk motions in their external regions to the depth or their potential wells.
We use high-resolution Herschel-PACS data of 2 nearby elliptical galaxies, IC1459 & NGC2768 to characterize their dust and stellar content. IC1459 & NGC2768 have an unusually large amount of dust for elliptical galaxies (1-3 x 10^5 Msun), this dust i
s also not distributed along the stellar content. Using data from GALEX (ultraviolet) to PACS (far-infrared), we analyze the spectral energy distribution (SED) of these galaxies with CIGALEMC as a function of the projected position, binning images in 7.2 pixels. From this analysis, we derive maps of SED parameters, such as the metallicity, the stellar mass, the fraction of young star and the dust mass. The larger amount of dust in FIR maps seems related in our model to a larger fraction of young stars which can reach up to 4% in the dustier area. The young stellar population is fitted as a recent (~ 0.5 Gyr) short burst of star formation for both galaxies. The metallicities, which are fairly large at the center of both galaxies, decrease with the radial distance with fairly steep gradient for elliptical galaxies.
