Troubled cosmic flows: turbulence, enstrophy and helicity from the assembly history of the intracluster medium

TL;DR

This study uses adaptive mesh refinement simulations to investigate how galaxy cluster turbulence, driven mainly by mergers and gas accretion, relates to their assembly history, focusing on enstrophy and helicity dynamics.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the generation and dissipation of turbulence in galaxy clusters, emphasizing the roles of shocks, baroclinicity, and vortex stretching in turbulence development.

Findings

Major mergers and gas accretion drive turbulence in the intracluster medium.

Enstrophy generation involves baroclinicity and shocks, with vortex stretching downstream.

Gas infall trajectories exhibit helicity and vorticity development at external shocks.

Abstract

Both simulations and observations have shown that turbulence is a pervasive phenomenon in cosmic scenarios, yet it is particularly difficult to model numerically due to its intrinsically multiscale character which demands high resolutions. Additionally, turbulence is tightly connected to the dynamical state and the formation history of galaxies and galaxy clusters, producing a diverse phenomenlogy which requires large samples of such structures to attain robust conclusions. In this work, we use an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) cosmological simulation to explore the generation and dissipation of turbulence in galaxy clusters, in connection to its assembly history. We find that major mergers, and more generally accretion of gas, is the main process driving turbulence in the intracluster medium. We have especially focused on solenoidal turbulence, which can be quantified through enstrophy. Our results seem to confirm a scenario for its generation which involves baroclinicity and compression at the external (accretion) and internal (merger) shocks, followed by vortex stretching downstream of them. We have also looked at the infall of mass to the cluster beyond its virial boundary, finding that gas follows trajectories with some degree of helicity, as it has already developed some vorticity in the external shocks.