Black holes, cooling flows and galaxy formation

Central black holes in galaxies are now well established as a ubiquitous phenomenon, and this fact is important for theories of cosmological structure formation. Merging of galaxy haloes must preserve the proportionality between black hole mass and baryonic mass; the way in which this happens may help solve difficulties with existing ing models of galaxy formation, which suffer from excessive cooling and thus over- produce stars. Feedback from active nuclei may be the missing piece of the puzzle, regulating galaxy-scale cooling flows. Such a process now seems to be observed in cluster-scale cooling flows, where dissipation of sound waves generated by radio lobes can plausibly balance the energy lost in X-rays, at least in a time-averaged sense.