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Intracluster thermodynamics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2004

G. Mark Voit
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Most of the baryons in the universe remain undetected. They are thought to be floating in intergalactic space, and their thermal state is highly uncertain. The only places where we have reasonably complete observations of the overall baryon population are in clusters of galaxies, where the baryons reveal themselves through their X-ray emission. There we find that only about 10% of the baryons have turned into stars, probably because feedback processes intervene to prevent more baryons from condensing. These galaxy formation processes seem to have left an imprint on the thermal state of the intracluster medium, but in order to interpret that imprint, one needs to pay close attention to how entropy develops in the intergalactic gas. Many of the global properties of clusters turn out to be determined primarily by the entropy threshold for cooling within a Hubble time. However, XMM-Newton observation are revealing a sort of altered similarity among the entropy profiles of clusters seeming to indicate that galactic winds may have smoothed the local intergalactic medium before it accreted onto clusters.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
© 2004 International Astronomical Union