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Andrew Fabian studies the interaction between accreting supermassive black holes and hot gas in galaxy clusters. His team's deep Chandra X-ray Observatory observation of the Perseus cluster revealed weak ripples in X-ray surface brightness around the central radio bubbles.

The study interpreted a nearby density jump as a weak shock wave and the ripples as signatures of propagating sound waves. Repeated inflation of bubbles by the central source could transfer enough energy to offset radiative cooling in the cluster core. The observation thus supplied a concrete mechanism linking a central black hole's activity to the thermal evolution of much more extended gas.^[ref]