We examine the long-standing cooling flow problem in galaxy clusters with 3D MHD simulations of isolated clusters including radiative cooling and anisotropic thermal conduction along magnetic field lines. The central regions of the intracluster medium (ICM) can have cooling timescales of ~200 Myr or shorter--in order to prevent a cooling catastrophe the ICM must be heated by some mechanism such as AGN feedback or thermal conduction from the thermal reservoir at large radii. The cores of galaxy clusters are linearly unstable to the heat-flux-driven buoyancy instability (HBI), which significantly changes the thermodynamics of the cluster core. The HBI is a convective, buoyancy-driven instability that rearranges the magnetic field to be preferentially perpendicular to the temperature gradient. For a wide range of parameters, our simulations demonstrate that in the presence of the HBI, the effective radial thermal conductivity is reduced to less than 10% of the full Spitzer conductivity. With this suppression of conductive heating, the cooling catastrophe occurs on a timescale comparable to the central cooling time of the cluster. Thermal conduction alone is thus unlikely to stabilize clusters with low central entropies and short central cooling timescales. High central entropy clusters have sufficiently long cooling times that conduction can help stave off the cooling catastrophe for cosmologically interesting timescales.
We present an implementation of thermal conduction including the anisotropic effects of magnetic fields for SPH. The anisotropic thermal conduction is mainly proceeding parallel to magnetic fields and suppressed perpendicular to the fields. We derive the SPH formalism for the anisotropic heat transport and solve the corresponding equation with an implicit conjugate gradient scheme. We discuss several issues of unphysical heat transport in the cases of extreme ansiotropies or unmagnetized regions and present possible numerical workarounds. We implement our algorithm into the GADGET code and stu…
Anisotropic Thermal Conduction as a Driver of Jet Collimation and Magnetic Field Amplification on Cold Fronts
Graduate Institute for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI(SOKENDAI 高级研究研究生院);Division of Science, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(日本国立天文台科学部);Astronomical Observatory, Kyoto University(京都大学天文台)
We simulate anisotropic thermal conduction between the intracluster medium (ICM) and the hot coronal interstellar medium (ISM) gas in cluster galaxies. In the earlier Paper I (Vijayaraghavan & Sarazin 2017a), we simulated the evaporation of the hot ISM due to isotropic (possibly saturated) conduction between the ISM and ICM. We found that hot coronae evaporate on $\sim 10^2$ Myr timescales, significantly shorter than the $\sim 10^3$ Myr gas loss times due to ram pressure stripping. No tails of stripped gas are formed. This is in tension with the observed ubiquity and implied longevity of compa…
We present a novel implementation of an extremum preserving anisotropic diffusion solver for thermal conduction on the unstructured moving Voronoi mesh of the AREPO code. The method relies on splitting the one-sided facet fluxes into normal and oblique components, with the oblique fluxes being limited such that the total flux is both locally conservative and extremum preserving. The approach makes use of harmonic averaging points and a simple, robust interpolation scheme that works well for strong heterogeneous and anisotropic diffusion problems. Moreover, the required discretisation stencil i…
We examine the role of thermal conduction and magnetic fields in cores of galaxy clusters through global simulations of the intracluster medium (ICM). In particular, we study the influence of thermal conduction, both isotropic and anisotropic, on the condensation of multiphase gas in cluster cores. Previous hydrodynamic simulations have shown that cold gas condenses out of the hot ICM in thermal balance only when the ratio of the cooling time ($t_{\rm cool}$) and the free-fall time ($t_{\rm ff}$) is less than $\approx 10$. Since thermal conduction is significant in the ICM and it suppresses lo…
We present the Rhapsody-C simulations that extend the Rhapsody-G suite of massive galaxy clusters at the $M_{\rm vir}\sim10^{15}\thinspace{\rm M}_{\odot}$ scale with cosmological magneto-hydrodynamic zoom-in simulations that include anisotropic thermal conduction, modified supermassive black hole (SMBH) feedback, new SMBH seeding and SMBH orbital decay model. These modelling improvements have a dramatic effect on the SMBH growth, star formation and gas depletion in the proto-clusters. We explore the parameter space of the models and report their effect on both star formation and the thermodyna…
The absence of large cooling flows in cool core clusters appears to require self-regulated energy feedback by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) but the exact heating mechanism has not yet been identified. Here, we analyse whether a combination of cosmic ray (CR) heating and thermal conduction can offset radiative cooling. To this end, we compile a large sample of 39 cool core clusters and determine steady state solutions of the hydrodynamic equations that are coupled to the CR energy equation. We find solutions that match the observed density and temperature profiles for all our clusters well. Rad…
We study the interplay between turbulent heating, mixing, and radiative cooling in an idealized model of cool cluster cores. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) jets are expected to drive turbulence and heat cluster cores. Cooling of the intracluster medium (ICM) and stirring by AGN jets are tightly coupled in a feedback loop. We impose the feedback loop by balancing radiative cooling with turbulent heating. In addition to heating the plasma, turbulence also mixes it, suppressing the formation of cold gas at small scales. In this regard, the effect of turbulence is analogous to thermal conduction. Fo…