Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2002-07-17
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Article appears in today's (18th July 2002) issue of Nature (vol. 418) with some images from this work on the front cover of t
Scientific paper
The hot plasma permeating clusters of galaxies often shows a central peak in the X-ray surface brightness that is coincident with a drop in entropy. This is taken as evidence for a cooling flow where the radiative cooling in the central regions of a cluster causes a slow subsonic inflow. Searches in all wavebands have revealed significantly less cool gas than predicted indicating that the mass deposition rate of cooling flows is much lower than expected. However, most cooling flow clusters host an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) at their centres. AGN can inflate large bubbles of hot plasma that subsequently rise through the cluster atmosphere, thus stirring this gas. Here we report on the results from highly resolved hydrodynamic simulations which for the first time show that buoyant bubbles increase the cooling time in the inner cluster regions and thereby significantly reduce the deposition of cold gas. This work demonstrates that the action of AGN in the centres of cooling flow clusters can explain the observed absence of large quantities of cooled gas.
Brueggen Marcus
Kaiser Christian R.
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