Related papers: Anisotropic Thermal Conduction and the Cooling Flo…
We study the interplay among cooling, heating, conduction, and magnetic fields in gravitationally stratified plasmas using simplified, plane-parallel numerical simulations. Since the physical heating mechanism remains uncertain in massive…
Shortly after the first results of Chandra and XMM-Newton appeared, many researchers in the field abandoned the term "cooling flow clusters" in favor of the name "cool core clusters". This change, I argue, has been causing damage by…
In recent years evidence has accumulated suggesting that the gas in galaxy clusters is heated by non-gravitational processes. Here we calculate the heating rates required to maintain a physically motived mass flow rate, in a sample of seven…
I study non-radiative cooling of X-ray emitting gas via heat conduction along magnetic field lines inside magnetic flux loops in cooling flow clusters of galaxies. I find that such heat conduction can reduce the fraction of energy radiated…
Galaxy clusters show large-scale azimuthal X-ray surface brightness fluctuations known as cold fronts. Cold fronts are argued to originate due to sloshing driven by sub-halo passage at close proximity to the cluster center. While this…
A long-standing question is whether radiative cooling can lead to local condensations of cold gas in the hot atmospheres of galaxies and galaxy clusters. We address this problem by studying the nature of local instabilities in rotating,…
We present a detailed study of cool-core systems in a sample of four galaxy clusters (RXCJ1504.1-0248, A3112, A4059, and A478) using archival X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Cool cores are frequently observed at the centers…
The radiative cooling time of hot gas in the cool cores of many galaxy clusters and massive elliptical galaxies drops in the centre to below 100 million years. The mass cooling rates inferred from simple modelling of X-ray observations of…
We present new, deep observations of the Phoenix cluster from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Karl Jansky Very Large Array. These data provide an order of magnitude improvement in depth and/or angular…
We investigate a model of galaxy clusters in which the hot intracluster gas is efficiently heated by dynamical friction (DF) of galaxies. We allow for both subsonic and supersonic motions of galaxies and use the gravitational drag formula…
Using high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters, we study the interaction between the brightest cluster galaxy, its supermassive black hole (BH) and the intracluster medium (ICM). We create initial conditions for which…
We present a new model for the creation of cool cores in rich galaxy clusters within a LambdaCDM cosmological framework using the results from high spatial dynamic range, adaptive mesh hydro/N-body simulations. It is proposed that cores of…
The viscous properties of the intracluster medium (ICM) remain poorly constrained. Cold fronts-sharp discontinuities formed during cluster mergers-offer a potential avenue to probe the effective viscosity of the ICM. Velocity shear across…
We present a spherically symmetric model for the origin and evolution of the temperature profiles in the hot plasma filling galaxy groups and clusters. We find that the gas in clusters is generically not isothermal, and that the temperature…
Numerical simulations of active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback in cool-core galaxy clusters have successfully avoided classical cooling flows, but often produce too much cold gas. We perform adaptive mesh simulations that include…
Feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) is believed to prevent catastrophic cooling in galaxy clusters. However, how the feedback energy is transformed into heat, and how the AGN jets heat the intracluster medium (ICM) isotropically,…
Precipitation of cold gas due to thermal instability in both galaxy clusters and the circumgalactic medium may regulate AGN feedback. We investigate thermal instability in idealized simulations of the circumgalactic medium with a parameter…
In cool-core galaxy clusters with central cooling times much shorter than a Hubble time, condensation of the ambient central gas is regulated by a heating mechanism, probably an active galactic nucleus (AGN). Previous analytical work has…
We analyze the linear stability of a dilute, hot plasma, taking into account the effects of stratification and anisotropic thermal conduction. The work is motivated by attempts to understand the dynamics of the intracluster medium in galaxy…
In conventional models of galactic and cluster cooling flows widespread cooling (mass dropout) is assumed to avoid accumulation of unacceptably large central masses. However, recent XMM observations have failed to find spectral evidence for…