Alfven heating in optical filaments in cooling flows

Details Alfven heating in optical filaments in cooling flows Alfven heating in optical filaments in cooling flows

1996-12-09

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9612088v1

A&A 324 (1997) 449-456

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

7 pages, 2 figures, TeX, aa.cmm style

Scientific paper

One of the major problems concerning cooling flows is the nature of the mechanism powering the emission lines of the optical filaments seen in the inner regions of cooling flows. In this work we investigate the plausibility of Alfv\'en heating (AH) as a heating/excitation mechanism of optical filaments in cooling flows. We use a time-dependent hydrodynamical code to follow the evolution of cooling condensations arising from the $10^7$ K cooling flow. The filaments contain magnetic fields and AH is at work at several degrees of efficiency (including no AH at all). We consider two damping mechanisms of Alfv\'en waves: nonlinear and turbulent. We calculate the optical line emission associated with the filaments and compare our results to the observations. We find that AH can be an important ionizing and heating source for class I filaments in the line-ratio scheme of Heckman et al. In addition, AH can be an important contributor to [OI]$\lambda 6300$ emission even for the more luminous class II systems.

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