English

EUV and X-ray observations of Abell 2199: a three-phase intracluster medium with a massive warm component

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

Various independent ways of constraining key cosmological parameters yielded a consensus range of values which indicates that at the present epoch the bulk of the universe's baryons is in the form of a warm (\sim 106^6 K) gas - a temperature regime which renders them difficult to detect. The discovery of EUV and soft X-ray excess emission from clusters of galaxies was originally interpreted as the first direct evidence for the large scale presence of such a warm component. We present results from an EUVE Deep Survey (DS) observation of the rich cluster Abell 2199 in the Lex/B (69 - 190 eV) filter passband. The soft excess radial trend (SERT), shown by a plot against cluster radius rr of the percentage EUV emission η\eta observed above the level expected from the hot intracluster medium (ICM), behaves as a simple function of rr which decreases monotonically towards r=0r = 0; it smoothly turns negative at rr \sim 6 arcmin, inwards of this radius the EUV is absorbed by cold matter with a line-of-sight column density of \geq 2.7 ×\times 1019^{19} cm2^{-2}. The centre of absorption is offset from that of the emission by \sim 1 arcmin, and the area involved is much larger than that of the cooling flow. These facts together provide strong evidence for a centrally concentrated but cluster-wide distribution of clumps of cold gas which co-exist with warm gas of similar spatial properties. Further, the simultaneous modeling of EUV and X-ray data requires a warm component even within the region of absorption. The phenomenon demonstrates a three phase ICM, with the warm phase estimated to be \sim 5-10 times more massive than the hot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0010610,
  title  = {EUV and X-ray observations of Abell 2199: a three-phase intracluster medium with a massive warm component},
  author = {Richard Lieu and Max Bonamente and Jonathan P. D. Mittaz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0010610},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

9 pages, 4 figures (1 in color), A&A in press