The relationship between the optical Hα filaments and the X‐ray emission in the core of the Perseus cluster

By A. C. Fabian, Jeremy S. Sanders, C. Crawford, Christopher J. Conselice, J. Gallagher III, R. Wyse. 2003

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NGC 1275 in the centre of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, Abell 426, is surrounded by a spectacular filamentary Hα nebula. Deep Chandra X-ray imaging has revealed that the brighter outer filaments are also detected in soft X-rays. This can be due to conduction and mixing of the cold gas in the filaments with the hot, dense intracluster medium. We show the correspondence of the filaments in both wavebands and draw attention to the relationship of two prominent curved north-west filaments to an outer, buoyant radio bubble seen as a hole in the X-ray image. There is a strong resemblance in the shape of the hole and the disposition of the filaments to the behaviour of a large air bubble rising in water. If this is a correct analogy, then the flow is laminar and the intracluster gas around this radio source is not turbulent. We obtain a limit on the viscosity of this gas.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6cef9557c7a54b37ffec566fa46afe23fa9d8984

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Citations in the corpus

Hydrodynamical simulations of cluster formation with central AGN heating (2005, background): “In fact, most of the observations of AGN-heated clusters point out that strong bubble-induced shocks appear to be absent, although recently a few clusters with moderate shocks in connection with AGN activity have been discovered (Fabian et al. 2003a; Nulsen et al. 2005a; McNamara et al. 2005).”
Heating Hot Atmospheres with Active Galactic Nuclei (2007, background): “If the transport coefficients are suppressed by no more than an order of magnitude, about the range suggested by observations, analytical estimates (Fabian et al. 2003a) and simulations (Ruszkowski et al. 2004a,b; Brüggen et al. 2005) agree that sound dissipation plays a significant role in…”
A deep Chandra observation of the Perseus cluster: shocks and ripples (2003, background): “The Hα filaments around NGC 1275 do, however, provide evidence that the effective Reynolds number is low and therefore that the viscosity is high (Fabian et al. 2003).”
Investigating AGN heating in a sample of nearby clusters (2006, background): “The energy also needs to be transported out to a large radius, for example, the viscous dissipation of sound waves in the ICM as they travel out in the cluster (Fabian et al. 2003a, 2005).”
Evolving turbulence and magnetic fields in galaxy clusters (2005, background): “The presence of long Hα filaments observed by Fabian et al. (2003, 2005) in the core of the Perseus cluster may not be inconsistent with various evidence for random motions in this cluster core (Churazov et al. 2004; Rebusco et al. 2005).”
Heating cooling flows with jets (2003, background): “Recently, Fabian et al. (2003a) have unsharp-masked a very long exposure of the Perseus cluster and detected numerous weak arc-like regions of enhanced density gradient that are similar to those seen in Fig.”
Collisional heating as the origin of filament emission in galaxy clusters (2008, result): “This depth is similar to that found by Fabian et al. (2003) from fundamentally different assumptions.”
Thermal conduction and reduced cooling flows in galaxy clusters (2003, background): “One problem with the last possibility is that the quasi-linear optical filaments seen in the Perseus cluster (Conselice et al. 2001) argue in that case against the gas being strongly turbulent (Fabian et al. 2003c).”
Buoyant radio lobes in a viscous intracluster medium (2004, methodology): “The most detailed X-ray investigation to date, based on a deep (200 ks) observation by Chandra/ACIS-S, has been presented by Fabian et al. (2003a).”
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTENDED Hα FILAMENTS IN COOLING FLOW CLUSTERS (2010, background): “…of these filaments, in one or more of several ways: (1) by channeling the inflow of clumps of gas along field lines, giving them coherent structure (Fabian et al. 2003), (2) preventing the hot, turbulent ICM from shredding the filaments (Hatch et al. 2007), (3) to help the growth of thermal…”
CAUSE AND EFFECT OF FEEDBACK: MULTIPHASE GAS IN CLUSTER CORES HEATED BY AGN JETS (2011, background): “The evidence for such cold filaments dredged out from the central galaxy is seen in the Perseus cluster (Fabian et al. 2003).”
A deeper X‐ray study of the core of the Perseus galaxy cluster: the power of sound waves and the distribution of metals and cosmic rays (2007, methodology): “The power implied by the analysis drops off with radius out to 120 kpc, with an e-folding length of about 50 kpc, consistent with models of viscous dissipation (Fabian et al. 2003a), which is required if heating by sound waves offsets radiative cooling.”
Cosmic ray transport in galaxy clusters: implications for radio halos, gamma-ray signatures, and cool core heating (2010, background): “The turbulence, which is most likely subsonic there, will therefore only have a speed of a few 100 km s−1 there (Fabian et al. 2003; Enßlin & Vogt 2006).”
Compressible turbulence in galaxy clusters: physics and stochastic particle re-acceleration (2007, background): “Interestingly enough, also upper limits to the turbulent–energy content in the ICM were obtained in a few nearby galaxy clusters from kinematical arguments related to the properties of Hα and X–ray filaments (e.g. Fabian et al. 2003; Crawford et al. 2005; Sun et al. 2006).”
Astrophysical smooth particle hydrodynamics (2009, background): “Examples include the angular momentum transport in accretion disks, see e.g. (Frank et al., 2002), or the dissipation of sound waves as a mechanism to heat intra-cluster media (Fabian et al., 2003).”
The impact of mergers on relaxed X-ray clusters – I. Dynamical evolution and emergent transient structures (2006, result): “…and we can only provide the caveat that some of our results are susceptible to change once we have the resources to properly model them (although see Markevitch et al. 2003; Fabian et al. 2003, for references suggesting that neither conduction nor turbulence is relevant in cluster cores).”