Alternatives to the Existence of Large Cooling Flows

Abstract

AbstractArguments against the existence of large scale cooling flows in clusters of galaxies are presented. The evidence for cooling flows is all circumstantial, consisting of observations of cool gas or hot gas with a radiative cooling time less than the Hubble time, or a central peak in the x-ray surface brightness profile. There is no evidence for large quantities (several tens to several hundreds of solar masses per year) of matter actually flowing anywhere. On the contrary, several lines of evidence — stellar dynamics, observations of the amount of star formation, x-ray surface brightness observations, theoretical calculations of the growth of thermal instabilities, the amount of cold gas — suggest that cooling flows, if they exist, must be suppressed by one to two orders of magnitude from the values implied by simple estimates based on the radiative cooling time of the x-ray emitting gas. Two heat sources which might accomplish this — thermal conduction and relativistic particles, are considered and an alternative to the standard model for cooling flows is presented: an accretion flow with feedback wherein the accretion of gas into a massive black hole in the central galaxy generates high energy particles that heat the gas and act to limit the accretion.