Searching for Bent AGN in Dynamically Young Systems

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are supermassive black holes surrounded by accretion disks that form bright radio jets, some of which are bent. Previous work has indicated that this bending is caused by the AGN's environment. It is thought that host galaxies located in dense gaseous regions, such as galaxy clusters and groups, experience ram pressure that bends the AGN jets. Dynamically young systems, such as recent group or cluster mergers, are a focal point in our study since they may host a more turbulent intracluster medium (ICM) that could increase the amount of ram pressure experienced by galaxies hosting AGN. We set out to analyze a sample of 269 bent AGN to determine which are part of dynamically young systems. We identified 26 bent AGN that belong to a group or merger by matching the sources to a Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) catalog of groups and potentially merging systems (Tempel et al., 2017). We utilize phase-space diagrams to obtain information about the location and relative motion of the bent AGN, group members, and first and second Brightest Group Galaxies (BGGs). Phase-space coordinates can further reveal environmental effects acting in clusters, such as the number of group galaxies and their proximity. The location of the BGG can provide insight into the cluster's dynamical age since we would expect to find a relaxed system's BGG at its center. The r-band magnitude gap between the first and second BGG can serve as a proxy for the dynamical state of the groups in our sample. Furthermore, we matched our sample to the eRASS1 X-ray survey (Bulbul et al., 2024) to find the difference between the optical and X-ray centers, which contains information about the dynamical condition of these systems. All in all, by searching for AGN in dynamically young systems, we aim to understand the role of environmental factors, particularly ram pressure due to a more turbulent ICM, in shaping the morphology of radio jets.