Thermal Conduction in Clusters of Galaxies
Astrophysics
2009-11-07 v1
Abstract
We estimate the thermal conductivity of a weakly collisional magnetized plasma with chaotic magnetic field fluctuations. When the fluctuation spectrum extends over two or more decades in wave-vector, we find that thermal conduction is very efficient; the conduction coefficient is only a factor ~5 below the classical Spitzer estimate. We suggest that conduction could play a significant role in cooling flows in clusters of galaxies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0110567,
title = {Thermal Conduction in Clusters of Galaxies},
author = {Ramesh Narayan and Mikhail V. Medvedev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0110567},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters