Publication Date

2003

Journal or Book Title

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

Abstract

A common feature of the X-ray bubbles observed in Chandra images of some "cooling flow" clusters is that they appear to be surrounded by bright, cool shells. Temperature maps of a few nearby luminous clusters reveal that the shells consist of the coolest gas in the clusters—much cooler than the surrounding medium. Using simple models, we study the effects of this cool emission on the inferred cooling flow properties of clusters. We find that the introduction of bubbles into model clusters that do not have cooling flows results in temperature and surface brightness profiles that resemble those seen in nearby "cooling flow" clusters. They also approximately reproduce the recent XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of a high minimum temperature of ~1-3 keV. Hence, bubbles, if present, must be taken into account when inferring the physical properties of the intracluster medium. In the case of some clusters, bubbles may account entirely for these observed features, calling into question their designation as clusters with cooling flows. However, since not all nearby "cooling flow" clusters show bubble-like features, we suggest that there may be a diverse range of physical phenomena that give rise to the same observed features.

Comments

This is the pre-published version harvested from ArXiv. The published version is located at http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/587/2/L75/

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1086/375336

Pages

L75-L78

Volume

587

Issue

2

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