Hot Gas In and Around Elliptical Galaxies

By W. Mathews, F. Brighenti. 2003

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

▪ Abstract We review the origin, evolution, and physical nature of hot gas in elliptical galaxies and associated galaxy groups. Unanticipated recent X-ray observations with Chandra and XMM indicate much less cooling than previously expected. Consequently, many long-held assumptions must be reexamined or discarded and new approaches must be explored. Chief among these are the role of heating by active galactic nuclei, the influence of radio lobes on the hot gas, details of the cooling process, possible relation between the hot and colder gas in elliptical galaxies, and the complexities of stellar enrichment of the hot gas.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f2ebfc80f46aa053b2f32d23a9b064296b4ab63

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Cappellari
2. P. Hopkins
3. L. Hernquist
4. T. Naab
5. C. Conroy
6. R. Dav'e
7. A. Dekel
8. R. Somerville

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. M. Blanton
2. M. Gaspari
3. M. Boquien
4. John Moustakas
5. R. Yan
6. A. Dekel
7. Y. Birnboim
8. P. Temi

In Instrumentation

1. M. Cappellari
2. T. Naab
3. C. Conroy
4. P. Hopkins
5. L. Hernquist
6. A. Dekel
7. R. Dav'e
8. Simon D. M. White

Citations in the corpus

• Modelling the galaxy bimodality: shutdown above a critical halo mass (2006, background): “…rate (Kauffmann et al. 2003), (d) the gasto-stellar mass ratio (Kannappan 2004), (e) the bulge-todisc ratio (Kauffmann et al. 2003), (f) the environment den- sity (Blanton et al. 2006). and (g) the presence of an X-ray halo (Helsdon & Ponman 2003; Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Osmond & Ponman 2004).”
• Gravitational quenching in massive galaxies and clusters by clumpy accretion (2007, result): “This is indeed comparable to the observed X-ray output of Lx ∼ 1042 erg s−1 from giant ellipticals and groups of virial halo mass in the ball-park of 1013M⊙ (Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Helsdon & Ponman 2003; Humphrey et al. 2006; Fukazawa et al. 2006).”
• AGN-controlled cooling in elliptical galaxies (2006, background): “For higher mass galaxies, the X–ray luminosity is dominated by the emission from the hot gaseous haloes, and O’Sullivan et al. find that LX ∝ L 2 B (see also the review by Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• x-cigale: fitting AGN/galaxy SEDs from X-ray to infrared (2020, background): “2 for all three components, with Ecut fixed at 100 keV (LMXB and HMXB; e.g. Zhang 1997; Motta et al. 2009) and 1 keV (hot gas; e.g. Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• X-Ray Thermal Coronae of Galaxies in Hot Clusters: Ubiquity of Embedded Mini-Cooling Cores (2006, background): “Various factors have been proposed to explain the dispersion of theLX - LB relation for the X-ray coronae of earlytype galaxies, including SN rate, galactic rotation, metallicity, dark matter halo and environments (see a review by Mathews & Brighenti 2003 and the references therein).”
• X-ray coronae in simulations of disc galaxy formation (2010, background): “…scatter in LX at fixed LK in these samples is, as seen for our sample of disc galaxies, that such galaxies are hosted by dark matter haloes drawn from a wide range of total masses (i.e. M200), leading to a similarly wide range of X-ray luminosities (Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Mathews et al. 2006).”
• AGN heating and ICM cooling in the HIFLUGCS sample of galaxy clusters (2008, background): “Feedback from supernovae is an important form of heating but has been shown to be sufficient to balance energy losses only in low-luminosity ellipticals with shallower gravitational potentials (Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• Heating Hot Atmospheres with Active Galactic Nuclei (2007, background): “An isotropic distribution of metals could be preserved through turbulent mixing and gas circulation (e.g., Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Heinz et al. 2006) or by launching bubbles on random trajectories, perhaps through jet precession, as has been observed in some clusters (e.g., Gitti et al. 2006).”
• CAUSE AND EFFECT OF FEEDBACK: MULTIPHASE GAS IN CLUSTER CORES HEATED BY AGN JETS (2011, background): “Nevertheless, the central dense disk is a common feature among elliptical galaxies (e.g., Macchetto et al. 1997; Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Verdoes et al. 2006).”
• The UV-Optical Color Magnitude Diagram. II. Physical Properties and Morphological Evolution On and Off of a Star-forming Sequence (2007, background): “For each 14 However, it is possible that galaxies of a given M⋆ might show a low level of star formation fed by gas associated with stellar mass loss (Knapp et al. 1992) and/or cooling flows (Fabian et al. 1982), or other phenomena (Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• THE NATURE OF LINER-LIKE EMISSION IN RED GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “We adopt a gas density profile that scales as the square root of the stellar density profile, ng ∝ n 1/2 ∗ (Mathews & Brighenti 2003 and references therein, also see discussion in §6.2.1), and normalize them to 100cm−3 at 1 kpc.”
• THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, unknown): “However, Xray observations show that the residual gas is a small fraction of the stellar mass (e.g. Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Humphrey et al. 2006) and therefore most of the gas must be either expelled or recycled into secondary episodes of star formation.”
• Chaotic cold accretion on to black holes (2013, background): “Within the central ∼300 pc, M∗ is assumed to be constant as commonly observed (Mathews & Brighenti 2003), thus inducing a flat gas density core.”
• Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, methodology): “For elliptical galaxies, we refer the reader to multiple other reviews examining their more detailed properties, including their stellar populations (Renzini 2006), their structure and classification (Kormendy et al. 2009), and their hot gas content (Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• Dynamics and high-energy emission of the flaring HST-1 knot in the M 87 jet (2006, background): “All of these constraints are in agreement with a general finding that the central electron number density in giant ellipticals is typically ∼0.1 cm−3, and declines as ∝ r−1.25 with the distance from their cores (Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• Hot and cold gas accretion and feedback in radio-loud active galaxies (2007, background): “Both the black hole mass and the mass of the galaxy-scale X-ray halo (e.g. Mathews & Brighenti 2003) are correlated with the mass of the host galaxy.”
• Galaxy bimodality due to cold flows and shock heating (2004, background): “Ellipticals of LB > 10 10.5L⊙ show a significant excess of X-ray flux plausibly associated with hot halo gas (Ciotti et al. 1991; Mathews & Brighenti 2003).”
• Mechanical AGN feedback: controlling the thermodynamical evolution of elliptical galaxies (2012, methodology): “(iii) Finally, the assumptions made for stellar source terms (smooth injection of mass and energy from evolved stars and SNIa), described in Section 2.2.1 (see also Mathews & Baker 1971; Loewenstein & Mathews 1987; Mathews & Brighenti 2003), clearly break down within the galactic core.”
• The ATLAS3D project – IV. The molecular gas content of early-type galaxies (2011, background): “The origin of this gas is not well understood; it could have come from the internal stellar mass-loss (e.g. Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Ciotti, Ostriker & Proga 2010) or it could have been acquired from an external source such as another galaxy or cold-mode accretion.”
• On the prevalence of radio‐loud active galactic nuclei in brightest cluster galaxies: implications for AGN heating of cooling flows (2006, background): “An alternative heating source, such as AGN, is therefore favoured (see the review by Mathews & Brighenti 2003, for a full discussion), and the overheating of the intragroup medium suggested here (for f 0.1) may provide this.”