Simulating the Cooling Flow of Cool-Core Clusters

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We carry out high-resolution adaptive mesh refinement simulation of a cool core cluster, resolving the flow from Mpc scales down to pc scales. We do not (yet) include any heating, focusing instead on the development of the cooling instabilities in order to understand how gas gets to the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the cluster. We find that, as the gas cools, the cluster develops a very flat temperature profile, undergoing a global cooling instability only in the central 100 pc of the cluster. Outside of this region, the flow is smooth, with no local cooling instabilities, and nat- urally produces very little low-temperature gas (below a few keV), in agreement with observations. The gas cools and condenses in the very center of the cluster, rapidly forming a thin accretion disk. Isotropic heat conduction does not affect the result, but we show that it is very sensitive to resolution, requiring very high mass resolution to correctly reproduce the small transition radius. The amount of cold gas produced at the very center grows rapidly until a reasonable estimate of the resulting AGN heating rate (assuming even a moderate accretion efficiency) overwhelms cooling. We argue that this naturally produces a thermostat which links the cooling of gas out to 100 kpc with the cold gas accretion in the central 100 pc, potentially closing the loop between cooling and heating.

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