Physics
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21310701q&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #107.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.404
Physics
Scientific paper
Galaxy clusters are among the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe. The majority of the baryonic mass in clusters resides in a hot, low density plasma that pervades the intracluster medium. The heating and cooling processes in galaxy cluster plasmas must be understood in order to make progress on a number of key problems in galaxy formation, including the formation of the most massive galaxies and black holes in the universe and the mechanism(s) suppressing radiative cooling in the central parts of clusters ("cooling flows"). Electron thermal conduction in cluster plasmas transports heat primarily along (but not across) magnetic field lines. Remarkably, convection in the presence of anisotropic heat conduction is fundamentally different from the familiar convection in stellar interiors: for a weak magnetic field, a plasma is convectively unstable regardless of the sign of the temperature gradient. Thus the entire intracluster medium in galaxy clusters is convectively unstable! In this talk, I will describe the physics of these convective instabilities and the results of nonlinear simulations studying their implications for galaxy cluster plasmas. I will also describe the possible importance of convection triggered by relativistic particles (produced by a central AGN) rather than by the thermal plasma.
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