Suppressed cooling and turbulent heating in the core of X-ray luminous clusters RXCJ1504.1-0248 and Abell 1664

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present the analysis of XMM–Newton observations of two X-ray luminous cool core clusters, RXCJ1504.1-0248 and Abell 1664. The Reflection Grating Spectrometer reveals a radiative cooling rate of $180\pm 40\, \rm M_{\odot }\rm \, yr^{-1}$ and $34\pm 6\, \rm M_{\odot }\rm \, yr^{-1}$ in RXCJ1504.1-0248 and Abell 1664 for gas above 0.7 keV, respectively. These cooling rates are higher than the star formation rates observed in the clusters and support simultaneous star formation and molecular gas mass growth on a time-scale of 3 × 108 yr or longer. At these rates, the energy of the X-ray cooling gas is inadequate to power the observed UV/optical line-emitting nebulae, which suggests additional strong heating. No significant residual cooling is detected below 0.7 keV in RXCJ1504.1-0248. By simultaneously fitting the first- and second-order spectra, we place an upper limit on turbulent velocity of 300 km $\rm s^{-1}$ at 90 per cent confidence level for the soft X-ray emitting gas in both clusters. The turbulent energy density is considered to be less than 8.9 and 27 per cent of the thermal energy density in RXCJ1504.1-0248 and Abell 1664, respectively. This means that it is insufficient for AGN heating to fully propagate throughout the cool core via turbulence. We find that the cool X-ray component of Abell 1664 (∼0.8 keV) is blueshifted from the systemic velocity by 750$^{+800}_{-280}$ km $\rm s^{-1}$. This is consistent with one component of the molecular gas in the core and suggests a similar dynamical structure for the two phases. We find that an intrinsic absorption model allows the cooling rate to increase to $520\pm 30\, \rm M_{\odot }\rm \, yr^{-1}$ in RXCJ1504.1-0248.