Conveners
Thursday morning: New frontiers of theory and observations
- Gianfranco Brunetti (IRA INAF)
I will discuss large scale transport in the ICM, mitigated by AGN jet feedback, and how it affects the evolution of thermal and non-thermal plasma in ICM and, in turn, the X-ray and radio properties of clusters. In particular, I will address the ability of AGN feedback to enhance conductive heat transport through a mechanism akin to the way geothermal heat pumps operate, based on a set of MHD...
Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities (KHI) along contact discontinuities in galaxy clusters have been used to constrain the strength of magnetic fields in galaxy clusters, following the assumption that, as magnetic field lines drape around the interface between the cold and hot phases, their magnetic tension resists the growth of perturbations. This has been observed in simulations of rigid objects...
Clusters of galaxies exhibit some of the most spectacular examples of optically bright, line emitting nebulae. These nebulae surround the central galaxies, are filamentary in nature and can extend over 100 kpc in size. Recently, Gendron-Marsolais et al. produced for the first time a detailed velocity map at optical wavelengths of the giant filamentary nebula in the Perseus cluster and revealed...
This talk is a piece of light but relevant theoretical-physicsy entertainment in the midst of serious astro content. Much of existing plasma (astro)physics (and indeed much of the rest of kinetic physics) is done hovering in the vicinity of a Maxwellian equilibrium, which is the maximum point of the standard Gibbs entropy and is achieved dynamically by means of two-particle collisions. In this...
A large proportion of galaxy clusters contain an ICM which supports temperature gradients that are inconsistent with the classical coulomb scattering rate. Turbulence has long been cited as a possible mechanism for enhanced scattering. In particular, the role of the whistler instability in limiting electron heat flux has been a recent area of interest. Numerical results have demonstrated the...
Turbulence driven by AGN activity constitutes an attractive energy source for heating the intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters. How this energy dissipates into the ICM plasma remains unclear, given its low collisionality and high magnetization, which precludes viscous heating in the ordinary gas dynamics sense. However, Kunz et al. 2011 proposed that gyroviscous heating, a form of...
