Related papers: Thermal conduction and reduced cooling flows in ga…
In many clusters of galaxies there is evidence for cooling flow in the central regions. A possibility is that a fraction of the gas forms cold molecular clouds. We investigate the minimum temperature which can be reached by clouds in…
We present spatially resolved X-ray spectra taken with the EPIC cameras of XMM-Newton of a sample of 17 cooling clusters and three non-cooling clusters for comparison. The deprojected spectra are analyzed with a multi-temperature model,…
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…
Clusters of galaxies are thought to contain about ten times as much dark matter as baryonic matter. The dark component therefore dominates the gravitational potential of the cluster, and the baryons confined by this potential radiate X-rays…
Early X-ray observations suggested that the intracluster medium cools and condenses at the centers of clusters, leading to a cooling flow of plasma in the cluster core. The increased incidence of emission-line nebulosity, excess blue light,…
We present a new model for the X-ray properties of the intracluster medium that explicitly includes heating of the gas by the energy released during the evolution of cluster galaxies. We calculate the evolution of clusters by combining the…
There are (at least) two unsolved problems concerning the current state of the thermal gas in clusters of galaxies. The first is identifying the source of the heating which offsets cooling in the centers of clusters with short cooling times…
We study steady, radial gas outflows from galaxies in an effort to understand the way tenuous and hot gas is transported to large distances away from galaxies. In particular, we obtain solutions for outflow problems, and study the outflow…
The dynamics of weakly magnetized collisionless plasmas in the presence of an imposed temperature gradient along an ambient magnetic field is explored with particle-in-cell simulations and modeling. Two thermal reservoirs at different…
Heat conduction plays an important role in the balance between heating and cooling in many astrophysical objects, e.g. cooling flows in clusters of galaxies. Here we investigate the effect of heat conduction on the interaction between a…
Recent Chandra observations of clusters of galaxies revealed the existence of a sharp ridge in the X-ray surface brightness where the temperature drops across the front. This front is called the cold front. We present the results of…
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…
Galaxy cluster mass distributions offer an important test of the cold dark matter picture of structure formation, and may even contain clues about the nature of dark matter. X-ray imaging spectroscopy of relaxed systems can map cluster dark…
We study the effect of cooling flows in galaxy clusters on the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) distortion and the possible cosmological implications. The SZ effect, alongwith X-ray observations of clusters, is used to determine the Hubble constant,…
We present a spectral analysis of the central X-ray emission for a sample of galaxy clusters observed with Chandra. We constrain the quantity of a second cospatial temperature component using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and discuss…
Recent X-ray observations have revealed a universal temperature profile of the intracluster gas of non-cooling flow clusters which is flat for r \le 0.2 r_{180}. Numerical simulations, however, obtain a steeper temperature profile in the…
Galaxy cluster cores are pervaded by hot gas which radiates at far too high a rate to maintain any semblance of a steady state; this is referred to as the cooling flow problem. Of the many heating mechanisms that have been proposed to…
We present a spherically-symmetric, steady-state model of galaxy clusters in which radiative cooling from the hot gas is balanced by heat transport through turbulent mixing. We assume that the gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium, and describe…
We examine recent developments in the cluster cooling flow scenario following recent observations by Chandra and XMM-Newton. We show that the distribution of gas emissivity verses temperature determined by XMM-Newton gratings observations…
The inhomogeneous cooling flow scenario predicts the existence of large quantities of gas in massive elliptical galaxies, groups, and clusters that have cooled and dropped out of the flow. Using spatially resolved, deprojected X-ray spectra…