#AthenaNuggets: Athena's Sharper View of Black Hole Feedback in Clusters of Galaxies

by Jeremy Sanders, Brian McNamara and Judith Croston

In many environments in the universe, black holes are affecting the surrounding gas and the clusters of galaxies are one of the few places where we can observe this feedback directly. Currently, astronomers do not understand how the energy is distributed within the cluster and a technique to reveal this unknown is to map the gas velocities. 

As described in the #AthenaNuggets 36, Athena/X-IFU will, for the first time, enable scientists to obtain detailed maps of the gas motions in the core of a cluster, shedding some light on the effect of the feedback.