|
| | | | |
| | | |
| Stat |
Members: 3645
Articles: 2'501'711
Articles rated: 2609
19 April 2024 |
|
| | | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
|
Chandra estimate of the magnetic field strength near the cold front in A3667 | | A. Vikhlinin
; M. Markevitch
; S. S. Murray
; | | Date: |
30 Aug 2000 | | Subject: | astro-ph | | Abstract: | We use the Chandra observation of the cold front in the intracluster gas of A3667 to estimate the magnetic field strength near the front. The front is seen in the Chandra data as a sharp discontinuity in the gas density which delineates a large body of dense cool gas moving with the near-sonic velocity through the less dense, hotter gas. Without a magnetic field, the front should be quickly disturbed by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability arising from tangential motion of gas layers. However, Chandra image shows that the front is stable within a +-30deg sector in the direction of the cloud motion, beyond which it gradually disappears. We suggest that the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability within the +-30deg sector is suppressed by surface tension of the magnetic field whose field lines are parallel to the front. The required field strength is B ~ 10 muG. Magnetic field near the front is expected to be stronger and have very different structure compared to the bulk of the intergalactic medium, because the field lines are stretched by the tangential gas motions. Such a magnetic configuration, once formed, would effectively stop the plasma diffusion and heat conduction across the front, and may inhibit gas mixing during the subcluster merger. We note that even the increased magnetic field near the front contributes only 10-20% to the total gas pressure, and therefore magnetic pressure is unimportant for hydrostatic cluster mass estimates. | | Source: | arXiv, astro-ph/0008499 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
browser Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
|
| |
|
|
|
|
News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:
| |
REGISTER