Massive and refined - II. The statistical properties of turbulent motions in massive galaxy clusters with high spatial resolution
By Franco Vazza, Gianfranco Brunetti, Claudio Gheller, R. Brunino, M. Brüggen. 2010
136 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the properties of chaotic motions in the intra cluster medium using a set of 20 galaxy clusters simulated with large dynamical range, using the adaptive mesh refinement code ENZO. The adopted setup allows us to study the spectral and spatial properties of turbulent motions in galaxy clusters with unprecedented detail, achieving an maximum available Reynolds number of the order of Re ∼ 500−1000 for the largest eddies. We investigated the correlations between the energy of these motions in the intra cluster medium and the dynamical state of the host systems. We find that the statistical properties of turbulent motions and their evolution with time imply that major merger events are responsible for the injection of the bulk of turbulent kinetic energy into the cluster. Turbulence is found to account for ∼20−30 per cent of the thermal energy in merging clusters, and ∼5 per cent in relaxed clusters. We compare the energies of turbulence and motions in our simulated clusters with upper-limits for real nearby clusters derived from XMM-Newton data. When turbulent motions are compared on the same spatial scales, the data from simulations are well within the range presently allowed by observations. Finally, we comment on the possibility that turbulence may accelerate relativistic particles leading to the formation of giant radio halos in turbulent (merging) clusters. On the basis of our simulations, we confirm the conclusions of previous semi-analytical studies that the fraction of turbulent clusters appears to be consistent with that of clusters hosting radio halos.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/887ec56db2343e98c36dff175952fda2d93b30d5
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Shocking results without shocks: Subsonic turbulence in smoothed particle hydrodynamics and moving-mesh simulations (2011, background): “…or even higher contributions of the kinetic energy in turbulence relative to the thermal energy in the ICM (Iapichino & Niemeyer 2008; Vazza et al. 2009; Maier et al. 2009; Lau et al. 2009; Vazza et al. 2011; Paul et al. 2011; Schmidt & Federrath 2011; Iapichino et al. 2011; Jones et al. 2011).”
- Mechanical AGN feedback: controlling the thermodynamical evolution of elliptical galaxies (2012, background): “One missing element of our models is the effect of cosmological merging and inflow, which may trigger additional turbulence, although more efficiently at large radii (>0.1 the virial radius, e.g. Vazza et al. 2011).”
- Moving mesh cosmology: the hydrodynamics of galaxy formation (2011, background): “These findings are in line with results of previous works which simulated similar problems with AMR codes (e.g. Mitchell et al. 2009; Vazza 2011; Vazza et al. 2011b).”