The Cavity of Cygnus A

In this Letter, we focus on the limb-brightened, prolate spheroidal cavity of the radio galaxy Cygnus A, as revealed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. We use the shock-heated, thermal intracluster medium around the expanding cavity to infer the properties of the radio synchrotron-emitting gas inside the cavity. The gas along the north and south edges of the cavity is found to have an average temperature of 6.0 keV, which is hotter than the temperature (4.6 keV) of the adjacent intracluster gas. It is proposed that this hotter gas is intracluster gas shocked by the expanding cavity. The shock is thus inferred to be weak (Mach number 1.3, a value also inferred from the density jump at the cavity edge), and its velocity is 1460 km s^-1. The total kinetic power of the expansion is found to be 1.2 × 10⁴⁶ ergs s^-1, which is somewhat larger than both the total radio power and the power emitted by the entire intracluster medium in the 2-10 keV band. It appears that most of the power of the jets in Cygnus A is currently going into heating the intracluster medium. From the derived pressure inside the cavity, there is no conclusive evidence for a component contributing pressure additional to the magnetic fields and relativistic particles responsible for the synchrotron radio emission. Furthermore, the ratio of energy densities in positive to negative cosmic rays in Cygnus A is between 1 and 100 (the latter being the value in our Galaxy)....