Simulations of clusters of galaxies with thermal conduction

Details Simulations of clusters of galaxies with thermal conduction Simulations of clusters of galaxies with thermal conduction

Aug 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003phdt.........7z&link_type=abstract

Thesis (PhD). THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, Source DAI-B 64/02, p. 767, Aug 2003, 166 pages.

Computer Science

Scientific paper

The primary objective of this work is to address the issue of whether or not thermal conduction can be an effective mechanism for the suppression of cooling flows in clusters of galaxies. A runaway process of subsonic mass inflow toward the dense core of a cluster, a cooling flow, is a phenomenon predicted by simple theoretical models, and was thought to have been conclusively seen in an earlier generation of X-ray data. More recent observations, however, fail to detect cooling flows at the predicted levels but the reasons for their absence remain unclear. One promising candidate is thermal conduction, which may be able to compensate for the effects of radiative cooling at the core and thus prevent the energy transport through accretion. In this dissertation we present a new Nbody-SPH code which includes radiative cooling and thermal conduction, and use it to simulate clusters. We compare the model that includes conduction and cooling to one that includes cooling only and one that has neither, and show that while the cooling-only model develops a cooling flow, the model with conduction remains more similar to the adiabatic one. Because of some outstanding numerical issues discussed in chapter 5, it is premature to make direct comparisons of our conductive models with observations, but we argue that the comparison among our different models as well as with published numerical results give a strong indication that thermal conduction may in fact be able to prevent cooling flows from forming. We also discuss the likely effects of magnetic fields, galaxy formation and feedback, which are not yet present in the current simulations but will be included in the next generation of models.

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