Related papers: Shocks and cold fronts in galaxy clusters
In galaxy clusters the entropy distribution of the IntraCluster Plasma modulates the latter's equilibrium within the Dark Matter gravitational wells, as rendered by our Supermodel. We argue the entropy production at the boundary shocks to…
Theoretical studies of the physical processes in clusters of galaxies are mainly based on the results of numerical simulations, which in turn are often directly compared to X-ray observations. Although trivial in principle, these…
X-ray observations of galaxy cluster merger shocks can be used to constrain nonthermal processes in the intracluster medium (ICM). The presence of nonthermal pressure components in the ICM, as well as the shock acceleration of particles and…
Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities (KHI) along contact discontinuities in galaxy clusters have been used to constrain the strength of magnetic fields in galaxy clusters, following the assumption that, as magnetic field lines drape around the…
(Abridged) The thermal history of the intracluster medium (ICM) is complex. Heat input from cluster mergers, AGN, and galaxy winds offsets and may even halt the cooling of the ICM. Consequently, the processes that set the properties of the…
Transport properties, such as viscosity and thermal conduction, of the hot intergalactic plasma in clusters of galaxies, are largely unknown. While for laboratory plasmas these characteristics are derived from the gas density and…
The thermodynamic properties of the hot plasma in galaxy clusters retains information on the processes leading to the formation and evolution of the gas in their deep, dark matter potential wells. These processes are dictated not only by…
Galaxy clusters are the most massive collapsed structures in the universe whose potential wells are filled with hot, X-ray emitting intracluster medium. Observations however show that a significant number of clusters (the so-called…
We present simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters in the Cold Dark Matter cosmogony. Clusters with a wide range of mass were selected from previous N-body models, and were resimulated at higher resolution using a…
The gas temperature in the cores of many clusters of galaxies drops inward by about a factor of three or more within the central 100kpc radius. The radiative cooling time drops over the same region from 5 or more Gyr down to about 10^8 yr.…
The conjecture that dark matter in galaxies is mostly cold fractal gas is developed in the more general context of the thermodynamics of the ideal isothermal gas subject to gravitational instability. This simple gas model already contains…
A pair of curved shocks in a collisionless plasma is examined with a two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The shocks are created by the collision of two electron-ion clouds at a speed that exceeds everywhere the threshold…
We review the theory of the formation of galaxy clusters and discuss their role as cosmological probes. We begin with the standard cosmological framework where we discuss the origin of the CDM matter power spectrum and the growth of density…
The objective of this paper is to help shedding some light on the nature and the properties of the cold structures formed via thermal instability in the magnetized atomic interstellar medium. To this end, we searched for clumps formed in…
We discuss hydrostatic models of galaxy clusters in which heat diffusion balances radiative cooling. We consider two different sources of diffusion, thermal conduction and turbulent mixing, parameterized by dimensionless coefficients, f and…
X-ray observations of galaxy clusters potentially provide powerful cosmological probes if systematics due to our incomplete knowledge of the intracluster medium (ICM) physics are understood and controlled. In this paper, we present mock…
We investigate thermal instability in an electron-ion magnetized plasma relevant to galaxy clusters, solar corona, and other two-component astrophysical objects. We apply the multicomponent plasma approach when the dynamics of all the…
In the centers of many galaxy clusters, the hot ($\sim$10$^7$ K) intracluster medium (ICM) can become dense enough that it should cool on short timescales. However, the low measured star formation rates in massive central galaxies and…
With the aim to investigate the statistical properties and the connection between thermal and non-thermal properties of the ICM in galaxy clusters, we have developed a statistical magneto-turbulent model which describes, at the same time,…
We report on the analysis of a suite of SPH simulations (incorporating cooling and star formation) of mergers involving idealised X-ray clusters whose initial conditions resemble relaxed clusters with cool compact cores observed by Chandra…