Related papers: Stellar Orbits and the Interstellar Gas Temperatur…
We review recent progress in understanding the evolution of hot interstellar gas in the halos of elliptical galaxies. Non-homologous variations in the physical size of the hot gas account for the large variations of x-ray luminosity among…
The variation of temperature and density in the hot, X-ray emitting gas around massive, group dominant elliptical galaxies can be understood as a combination of gas ejected from evolving galactic stars and gas that accumulates in the outer…
We compare optical and high quality x-ray data for three bright ellipticals in the Virgo cluster, NGC 4472, 4649, and 4636. The distribution of total mass in NGC 4472 and 4649 determined from x-ray data is sensitive to the stellar mass over…
The X-ray emitting interstellar medium of early type galaxies is often used as a tool to determine their total mass M and stellar orbital anisotropy beta profiles, based on the hypothesis of hydrostatic equilibrium for the hot gas. Here we…
X-ray emitting gaseous halos, such as that in elliptical galaxies like NGC 4472, cannot have been produced solely from gas expelled from galactic stars. In traditional models for the evolution of hot interstellar gas (cooling flows) in…
We explore the possibly important influence of cooled interstellar gas on the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies. Interstellar cooling is described by a parameterized sink term in the equation of continuity. Parameters that give the…
We report on the discovery of a new correlation between global parameters of the hot interstellar gas in elliptical galaxies. We reanalyze archival Chandra data for 30 normal early-type systems, removing the contributions of resolved and…
We present an analytic formulation for the equilibrium gas density profile of early-type galaxies that explicitly includes the contribution of stars in the gravitational potential. We build a realistic model for an isolated elliptical…
We investigated the dynamical structure of 53 elliptical galaxies, based on the {\it Chandra} archival X-ray data. In X-ray luminous galaxies, a temperature increases with radius and a gas density is systematically higher at the optical…
We present an X-ray analysis of 54 normal elliptical galaxies in the Chandra archive and isolate their hot gas component from the contaminating point source emission, allowing us to conduct, for the first time, a morphological analysis on…
We determine X-ray temperatures and abundances for elliptical galaxies drawn from a complete, optically selected sample. The optical magnitude-limited sample consists of 43 galaxies, complete to a (corrected) B magnitude of m_B^o=11.36. Of…
In this paper we examine how well galaxies and intra-cluster gas trace the gravitational potential of clusters. Utilizing mass profiles derived from gravitational lensing and X-ray observations, coupled with measured galaxy velocities, we…
This is the third paper in a series analyzing X-ray emission from the hot interstellar medium in a sample of 54 normal elliptical galaxies observed by Chandra, focusing on 36 galaxies with sufficient signal to compute radial temperature…
We analyze six X-ray bright elliptical galaxies, observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton, and approximate their gravitational potentials by isothermal spheres phi(r)=v_c^2 ln(r) over a range of radii from ~0.5 to ~25 kpc. We then compare the…
We review the origin and structure of hot (cooling flow) gas in elliptical galaxies. X-ray observations can be used to determine the stellar mass to light ratio, the mass profiles of dark matter halos, and the interstellar magnetic field.…
The presence of hot X-ray emitting gas is ubiquitous in massive early-type galaxies. However, much less is known about the content and physical status of the hot X-ray gas in low-mass ellipticals. In the present paper we study the X-ray gas…
We present detailed spatially resolved measurements of the thermodynamic properties of the X-ray emitting gas in the inner regions of the five nearest, X-ray and optically brightest, and most X-ray morphologically relaxed giant elliptical…
We examine whether isothermal models of the hot gas can successfully describe the ASCA and ROSAT spectra of NGC 1399, NGC 4472, NGC 4636, and NGC 5044. Broad-band spectral fitting of the ASCA SIS and GIS data accumulated within a radius of…
NGC3379 is a well studied nearby elliptical for which optical investigations have claimed a little dark matter content, or even no dark matter. Recently, its total mass profile M(r) has been derived by exploiting Chandra observations of its…
X-ray emitting atmospheres of non-rotating early-type galaxies and their connection to central active galactic nuclei have been thoroughly studied over the years. However, in systems with significant angular momentum, processes of heating…