Anatomy of a Cooling Flow: The Feedback Response to Pure Cooling in the Core of the Phoenix Cluster
Name
McDonald_2019_ApJ_885_63.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.53 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
McDonald, M.
McNamara, B. R.
Voit, G. M.
Bayliss, Matthew B
Benson, B. A.
Brodwin, M.
Canning, R. E. A.
Florian, M. K.
Garmire, G. P.
Gaspari, M.
Date Issued
October 2019
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Citation
McDonald, M. et al. "Anatomy of a Cooling Flow: The Feedback Response to Pure Cooling in the Core of the Phoenix Cluster." Astrophysical Journal 885, 1 (October 2019): 63 © 2019 American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We present new, deep observations of the Phoenix cluster from Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Karl Jansky Very Large Array. These data provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in depth and/or angular resolution over previous observations at X-ray, optical, and radio wavelengths. We find that the one-dimensional temperature and entropy profiles are consistent with expectations for pure-cooling models. In particular, the entropy profile is well fit by a single power law at all radii, with no evidence for excess entropy in the core. In the inner ∼10 kpc, the cooling time is shorter than any other known cluster by an order of magnitude, while the ratio of the cooling time to freefall time (t cool/t ff) approaches unity, signaling that the intracluster medium is unable to resist multiphase condensation on kpc scales. The bulk of the cooling in the inner ∼20 kpc is confined to a low-entropy filament extending northward from the central galaxy, with t cool/t ff ∼ 1 over the length of the filament. In this filament, we find evidence for ∼1010 M o in cool (∼104 K) gas (as traced by the [O ii]λλ3726,3729 doublet), which is coincident with the low-entropy filament and absorbing soft X-rays. The bulk of this cool gas is draped around and behind a pair of X-ray cavities, presumably bubbles that have been inflated by radio jets. These data support a picture in which active galactic nucleus feedback is promoting the formation of a multiphase medium via uplift of low-entropy gas, either via ordered or chaotic (turbulent) motions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab464c
