ON THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTENDED Hα FILAMENTS IN COOLING FLOW CLUSTERS
By M. McDonald, Sylvain Veilleux, D. Rupke, R. Mushotzky. 2010
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present a high spatial resolution Hα survey of 23 cooling flow clusters using the Maryland Magellan Tunable Filter, covering 1–2 orders of magnitude in cooling rate, dM/dt, temperature, and entropy. We find that 8/23 (35%) of our clusters have complex, filamentary morphologies at Hα, while an additional 7/23 (30%) have marginally extended or nuclear Hα emission, in general agreement with previous studies of line emission in cooling flow cluster brightest cluster galaxies. A weak correlation between the integrated near-UV luminosity and the Hα luminosity is also found for our complete sample with a large amount of scatter about the expected relation for photoionization by young stars. We detect Hα emission out to the X-ray cooling radius, but no further, in several clusters and find a strong correlation between the Hα luminosity contained in filaments and the X-ray cooling flow rate of the cluster, suggesting that the warm ionized gas is linked to the cooling flow. Furthermore, we detect a strong enhancement in the cooling properties of the intracluster medium (ICM) coincident with the Hα emission, compared to the surrounding ICM at the same radius. While the filaments in a few clusters may be entrained by buoyant radio bubbles, in general, the radially infalling cooling flow model provides a better explanation for the observed trends. The correlation of the Hα and X-ray properties suggests that conduction may be important in keeping the filaments ionized. The thinness of the filaments suggests that magnetic fields are an important part of channeling the gas and shielding it from the surrounding hot ICM.
Subfields: Computational Mechanics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1db6dbcd396a234b55f2a731c86bf6cc77593fc
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In Computational Mechanics
Citations in the corpus
- Thermal instability and the feedback regulation of hot haloes in clusters, groups and galaxies (2011, background): “Observationally there is a sharp threshold in central entropy/cooling time below which cold gas is observed in groups and clusters (e.g., Cavagnolo et al. 2008; Heckman et al. 1989; Hu, Cowie, & Wang 1985; McDonald et al. 2010).”
- Chaotic cold accretion on to black holes (2013, background): “It is thus not surprising that most of the multiphase gas in the core of galaxies, groups and clusters is observed from hundreds pc to several kpc (e.g. Mathews & Brighenti 2003; Rafferty et al. 2008; McDonald et al. 2010; McDonald, Veilleux & Mushotzky 2011a; Davis et al. 2012; Werner et al. 2013).”
- Raining on black holes and massive galaxies: the top-down multiphase condensation model (2016, background): “…and [N+] (6585.2 Å) filaments and clouds up to 10 kpc from the centre, which are tightly correlated with soft X-ray and far-ultraviolet (FUV) emission (McDonald & Veilleux 2009; McDonald et al. 2010; McDonald, Veilleux & Mushotzky 2011; Werner et al. 2014; Tremblay et al. 2015 and refs. therein).”
- CAUSE AND EFFECT OF FEEDBACK: MULTIPHASE GAS IN CLUSTER CORES HEATED BY AGN JETS (2011, background): “The Hα survey of McDonald et al. (2010, 2011a) shows both kinds of Hα emitting gas.”