1999/08/31 by F. R. Pearce, P. Thomas, P. A. Thomas +2 · 151 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Baryon #Cluster (spacecraft) #Cooling flow #Dark matter #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy cluster #Luminosity #Optics #Physics #Radiative cooling #Radiative transfer #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.2000.03773.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 317(4), 1029-1040 (Oxford University Press) · 14 pages, accepted to MNRAS, substantially revised from previous version
arxiv created 2000/06/02 · openalex publication_date 2000/10/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this paper, we investigate the effect of cooling on the X-ray properties of galaxy clusters. We have performed N-body, hydrodynamical simulations both with and without the effects of radiative cooling, but neglecting the effects of star formation and feedback. We show that radiative cooling produces an inflow of high-entropy gas from the outer parts of the cluster, thus raising the cluster temperature and decreasing the X-ray luminosity. With radiative cooling clusters are on average from three to five times less luminous in X-rays than the same clusters simulated without cooling. However, we do not produce a large constant-density core in either the gas or the dark matter distributions. Our results contradict previous work in which cooling raises the X-ray luminosity and deposits an unreasonably large amount of mass in the central cluster galaxy. We achieve this by selecting our numerical resolution in such a way that a reasonable fraction of the baryonic material cools and by decoupling the hot and cold gas in our simulations, a first step towards modelling multiphase gas. We emphasize that globally cooling a sensible amount of material is vital and the presence or absence of massive central concentrations of cold baryonic material has a dramatic effect upon the resultant X-ray properties of the clusters.