Mass deposition in cooling flows - analysis of the X-ray data

Abstract

We present a ‘multiphase method’ for the analysis of X-ray data of the cooling inflow region of intracluster gas in clusters of galaxies. The method employs a range of densities at each radius and treats the mass-deposition from the flow in a self-consistent way. We find good agreement between results from this multiphase method and those obtained with a previous, single-phase approach which assumed only one characteristic density at each radius. For the best data-sets, the density distribution of the various phases agrees with theoretical expectations only if a massive halo is added to the gravitational potential of the central galaxy. We present mass deposition profiles, |$\dot M(\lt r)$| of those clusters for which the method is applicable. These rise linearly with radius and reach values of up to 100 M⊙ yr−1 within 100 kpc.