Evidence for radio-source heating of groups

We report evidence that the gas properties of X-ray groups containing radio galaxies differ from those of radio-quiet groups. For a well-studied sample of ROSAT-observed groups, we found that more than half of the elliptical-dominated groups can be considered `radio-loud', and that radio-loud groups are likely to be hotter at a given X-ray luminosity than radio-quiet groups. We tested three different models for the origin of the effect and conclude that radio-source heating is the most likely explanation. We found several examples of groups where there is strong evidence from Chandra or XMM-Newton images for interactions between the radio source and the group gas. A variety of radio-source heating processes are important, including shock-heating by young sources and gentler heating by larger sources. The heating effects can be longer-lasting than the radio emission. We show that the sample of X-ray groups used in our study is not significantly biased in the fraction of radio-loud groups that it contains. This allows us to conclude that the energy per particle that low-power radio galaxies can inject over the group lifetime is comparable to the requirements of structure formation models.