Far-ultraviolet morphology of star-forming filaments in cool core brightest cluster galaxies
Name
Far ultraviolet.pdf
Size
13.65 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7e5c9db56e587994146cd2fa097a9071
Author(s)
Tremblay, G. R.
O'Dea, C. P.
Baum, S. A.
Mittal, R.
Combes, F.
Li, Y.
McNamara, B. R.
Bremer, M. N.
Clarke, T. E.
Donahue, M.
Date Issued
June 2015
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Tremblay, G. R.; O'Dea, C. P.; Baum, S. A.; Mittal, R.; McDonald, M. A.; Combes, F.; Li, Y. et al. “Far-Ultraviolet Morphology of Star-Forming Filaments in Cool Core Brightest Cluster Galaxies.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 451, no. 4 (June 29, 2015): 3768–3800.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
We present a multiwavelength morphological analysis of star-forming clouds and filaments in the central (≲50 kpc) regions of 16 low-redshift (z < 0.3) cool core brightest cluster galaxies. New Hubble Space Telescope imaging of far-ultraviolet continuum emission from young (≲10 Myr), massive (≳5 M⊙) stars reveals filamentary and clumpy morphologies, which we quantify by means of structural indices. The FUV data are compared with X-ray, Lyα, narrow-band Hα, broad-band optical/IR, and radio maps, providing a high spatial resolution atlas of star formation locales relative to the ambient hot (∼107–8 K) and warm ionized (∼104 K) gas phases, as well as the old stellar population and radio-bright active galactic nucleus (AGN) outflows. Nearly half of the sample possesses kpc-scale filaments that, in projection, extend towards and around radio lobes and/or X-ray cavities. These filaments may have been uplifted by the propagating jet or buoyant X-ray bubble, or may have formed in situ by cloud collapse at the interface of a radio lobe or rapid cooling in a cavity's compressed shell. The morphological diversity of nearly the entire FUV sample is reproduced by recent hydrodynamical simulations in which the AGN powers a self-regulating rain of thermally unstable star-forming clouds that precipitate from the hot atmosphere. In this model, precipitation triggers where the cooling-to-free-fall time ratio is tcool/tff ∼ 10. This condition is roughly met at the maximal projected FUV radius for more than half of our sample, and clustering about this ratio is stronger for sources with higher star formation rates.
MIT Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv1151
