High velocity clouds interacting with galactic halo plasma as a source of X-ray emission

Details High velocity clouds interacting with galactic halo plasma as a source of X-ray emission High velocity clouds interacting with galactic halo plasma as a source of X-ray emission

Apr 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005jplph..71..111k&link_type=abstract

Journal of Plasma Physics, vol. 71, Issue 2, p.111-118

Physics

Plasma Physics

Scientific paper

Several high velocity clouds (HVCs) are now known to be soft X-ray sources. In this paper we suggest that an interaction between the HVCs and the galactic halo is leading to plasma instabilities that generate energetic electrons which in turn generate X-ray emission. This process is essentially analogous to the interaction process between comets and non-magnetized planets with the solar wind which is also known to lead to the generation of X-rays. We show that for reasonable assumptions about the galactic halo magnetic field, the X-ray emission can be converted into an estimate of the mean galactic halo density at the position of the cloud. This provides a method for estimating the baryonic mass of the plasma halo provided that we can obtain a good estimate for the distance to the HVC.

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