Related papers: Anisotropic Thermal Conduction and the Cooling Flo…
The radial distributions of temperature, density, and gas entropy among cool-core clusters tend to be quite similar, suggesting that they have entered a quasi-steady state. If that state is regulated by a combination of thermal conduction…
Galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the Universe, contain vast amounts of dark matter, galaxies, and hot ionised gas known as the intracluster medium (ICM). In relaxed cluster cores, the ICM appears to cool…
The radiative cooling time of the hot gas at the centres of cool cores in clusters of galaxies drops down to 10 million years and below. The observed mass cooling rate of such gas is very low, suggesting that AGN feedback is very tightly…
(Abridged) Existing models invoking AGN activty to resolve the cooling flow conundrum in galaxy clusters focus exclusively on the role of the central galaxy. Such models require fine-tuning of highly uncertain microscopic transport…
We investigate the thermodynamic and chemical structure of the intracluster medium (ICM) across a statistical sample of 20 galaxy clusters analysed with the Chandra X-ray satellite. In particular, we focus on the scaling properties of the…
Chandra and XMM-Newton observations have confirmed the presence of large temperature gradients within the cores of many relaxed clusters of galaxies. Here we investigate whether thermal conduction operating over those gradients can supply…
The intracluster medium (ICM) is stably stratified in the hydrodynamic sense with the entropy $s$ increasing outwards. However, thermal conduction along magnetic field lines fundamentally changes the stability of the ICM, leading to the…
Understanding the thermodynamic state of the hot intracluster medium (ICM) in a galaxy cluster requires a knowledge of the plasma transport processes, especially thermal conduction. The basic physics of thermal conduction in plasmas with…
We present results from a large set of N-body/SPH hydrodynamical cluster simulations aimed at studying the statistical properties of turbulence in the ICM. The numerical hydrodynamical scheme employs a SPH formulation in which gradient…
Understanding heating processes in galaxy clusters is essential for predicting the regulation of radiative cooling and star formation, and for clarifying the mechanisms underlying active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback in cool-core…
We conduct two kinds of homogeneous isotropic turbulence simulations relevant for the intracluster medium (ICM): (i) pure turbulence runs without radiative cooling; (ii) turbulent heating$+$radiative cooling runs with global thermal…
Motivated by observations of multiphase galaxy outflows, we explore the impact of isotropic and anisotropic electron thermal conduction on the evolution of radiatively-cooled, cold clouds embedded in hot, magnetized winds. Using the…
We report the results of recent numerical simulations of the head-on merger of a cooling flow cluster with an infalling subcluster of galaxies. These simulations examined the effects of different types of cluster mergers (with 16:1 and 4:1…
The X-ray properties of a relaxed cluster of galaxies are determined primarily by its gravitational potential well and the entropy distribution of its intracluster gas. That entropy distribution reflects both the accretion history of the…
It is now widely accepted that heating processes play a fundamental role in galaxy clusters, struggling in an intricate but fascinating `dance' with its antagonist, radiative cooling. Last generation observations, especially X-ray, are…
The hot intracluster medium (ICM) is thought to be quiescent with low observed velocity dispersions. Surface brightness fluctuations of the ICM also suggest that its turbulence is subsonic with a Kolmogorov scaling relation, indicating that…
Thermal conduction in tangled magnetic fields is reduced because heat conducting electrons must travel along the field lines longer distances between hot and cold regions of space than if there were no fields. We consider the case when the…
We investigate the properties of the intracluster medium (ICM) that forms within N-body/hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters in a \LambdaCDM cosmology. When radiative cooling and a simple model for galactic feedback are included,…
In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified from a condition on entropy to a condition on…
We investigate how different magnetohydrodynamic models of propagation of a weak (Mach number ~1.2) shock in the core of a galaxy cluster affect its observational appearance, using the Perseus cluster as our fiducial model. In particular,…