Related papers: On the formation of cold fronts in massive mergers
Chandra X-ray observations revealed the presence of cold fronts (sharp contact discontinuities between gas regions with different temperatures and densities) in the centers of many, if not most, relaxed clusters with cool cores. We use…
Cold fronts were originally interpreted as being the result of subsonic/transonic motions of head-on merging substructures. This merger core remnant model is theoretically justified and hold relatively well for clusters that have clear…
Cold fronts (CFs) are found in most galaxy clusters, as well as in some galaxies and groups of galaxies. We propose that some CFs are relics of merging between two shocks propagating in the same direction. Such shock mergers typically…
Table of contents (abridged): COLD FRONTS Origin and evolution of merger cold fronts Cold fronts in cluster cool cores . . . Simulations of gas sloshing. Origin of density discontinuity. . . . Effect of sloshing on cluster mass estimates…
We present results from a suite of binary merging cluster simulations. The hydrodynamical cluster simulations are performed employing a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) formulation in which gradient errors are strongly reduced by means…
We present a simulated cluster of galaxies, modeled with a pre-heated intracluster medium, that exhibits X-ray features similar to the `cold fronts' seen in Chandra observations. Mock observations at a particular epoch show factor two…
Cold Fronts and shocks are hallmarks of the complex intra-cluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters. They are thought to occur due to gas motions within the ICM and are often attributed to galaxy mergers within the cluster. Using…
Cold fronts have been observed in a large number of galaxy clusters. Understanding their nature and origin is of primary importance for the investigation of the internal dynamics of clusters. To gain insight on the nature of these features,…
We use numerical simulations with hydrodynamics to demonstrate that a class of cold fronts in galaxy clusters can be attributed to oscillations of the dark matter distribution. The oscillations are initiated by the off-axis passage of a…
We present the results of high-resolution AP3M+SPH simulations of merging clusters of galaxies. We find that the compression and shocking of the core gas during a merger can lead to large increases in bolometric X-ray luminosities and…
We present a simplified and fast method for simulating minor mergers between galaxy clusters. Instead of following the evolution of the dark matter halos directly by the N-body method, we employ a rigid potential approximation for both…
Chandra has significantly advanced our knowledge of the processes in the intracluster gas. The discovery of remarkably regular ``cold fronts'', or contact discontinuities, in merging clusters showed that gas dynamic instabilities at the…
Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of many clusters reveal sharp discontinuities in the surface brightness, which, unlike shocks, have lower gas temperature on the X-ray brighter side of the discontinuity. For that reason these features…
We present Chandra observations of the cool cluster A168, for which previous X-ray imaging and optical studies indicated a merger of two subclusters nearly in the plane of the sky. We derive a temperature map for A168, which shows that the…
We present a new scenario for the formation of cool cores in rich galaxy clusters based on results from recent high spatial dynamic range, adaptive mesh Eulerian hydrodynamic simulations of large-scale structure formation. We find that…
Recently, high-resolution Chandra observations revealed the existence of very sharp features in the X-ray surface brightness and temperature maps of several clusters (Vikhlinin et. al., 2001). These features, called ``cold fronts'', are…
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…
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…
High-resolution Chandra images of several clusters of galaxies reveal sharp, edge-like discontinuities in their gas density. The gas temperature is higher in front of the edge where the density is low, corresponding to approximately…
X-ray observations of clusters of galaxies reveal the presence of edges in surface brightness and temperature, known as "cold fronts". In relaxed clusters with cool cores, these commonly observed edges have been interpreted as evidence for…