Simulation of the Magnetothermal Instability in 3D and Application to Clusters of Galaxies

Details Simulation of the Magnetothermal Instability in 3D and Application to Clusters of Galaxies Simulation of the Magnetothermal Instability in 3D and Application to Clusters of Galaxies

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.7703p&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #77.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

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In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified such that atmospheres in which the temperature increases with height are unstable to convection. We present fully three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations with anisotropic thermal conduction of the resultant instability, which we call the magnetothermal instability (MTI). We discuss different saturation mechanisms of the instability, which can include a rearrangement of the atmosphere to an isothermal vertical profile. In addition, we show that the saturated steady state turbulence efficiently transports heat and generates a magnetic dynamo to amplify the magnetic field until it is in equipartition with the subsonic convective velocities.
The intracluster medium (ICM) of clusters of galaxies is in the long mean free path regime where thermal conduction is purely anisotropic. We show that for a typical galaxy cluster, the ICM is unstable to the MTI on scales of several kiloparsecs. We present initial simulations of the MTI in a model galaxy cluster and extract computed temperature and density profiles to compare to observations.

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