  We report on the discovery of a new quantitative relationship between X-ray
gas morphology and radio and X-ray AGN luminosities in normal elliptical
galaxies. This is the second paper in a series using data on 54 objects from
the Chandra public archive and builds on the findings of Paper I, which
demonstrated that hydrostatic equilibrium in elliptical galaxies holds, at
best, only approximately and that the shape of the X-ray isophotes is unrelated
to the shape of the gravitational potential. Instead, the gas is almost always
asymmetrically disturbed. In this paper, we quantify the amount of asymmetry
and study its correlation with other galaxy properties. We also determine radio
powers and derive X-ray AGN luminosities for our galaxy sample. We find that
the amount of asymmetry in the gas is correlated with both measures of AGN
activity, in the sense that the hot gas is more disturbed in galaxies with
higher radio and X-ray AGN luminosities. We find no evidence that galaxy
density has significant effects on gas morphology. We do however find evidence
for a correlation between gas asymmetry and the presence of hot ambient gas,
which we interpret as a signature of hydrodynamic interactions with an external
ambient medium. Surprisingly, the AGN-morphology connection persists all the
way down to the weakest AGN luminosities in rather X-ray faint galaxies. This
is strong morphological evidence that supports the general importance of AGN
feedback, even in normal elliptical galaxies.
