A study of cool core resiliency and entropy mixing in simulations of galaxy cluster mergers

TL;DR

This study uses advanced hydrodynamical simulations to investigate how galaxy cluster mergers affect core entropy and stability, revealing the importance of merger dynamics and angular momentum in core resilience.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the effects of merging parameters on cool-core stability and entropy generation, including the role of hydrodynamic instabilities and merger geometry.

Findings

Cool cores are generally disrupted in adiabatic mergers.

Hydrodynamic instabilities contribute significantly to entropy in off-axis mergers.

Radiative processes can enhance core resilience, especially in unequal-mass off-axis mergers.

Abstract

We present results from a suite of binary merging cluster simulations. The hydrodynamical cluster simulations are performed employing a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) formulation in which gradient errors are strongly reduced by means of an integral approach. We consider adiabatic as well as radiative simulations, in which we include gas cooling, star formation and energy feedback from supernovae. We explore the effects of merging on the thermodynamic structure of the intracluster gas of the final merger remnant. In particular, we study how core entropy is generated during the merging and the stability properties of the initial cool-core profile against disruption. To this end, we consider a range of initial mass ratio and impact parameters. Final entropy profiles of our adiabatic merging simulations are in good accord with previous findings (ZuHone 2011), with cool-cores being disrupted for all of the initial merging setups. For equal-mass off-axis mergers, we find that a significant contribution to the final primary core entropy is due to hydrodynamic instabilities generated by rotational motions, which are induced by tidal torques during the first pericenter passage. In radiative simulations, cool-cores are more resilient against heating processes; nonetheless, they are able to maintain their integrity only in the case of off-axis mergers with very unequal masses. We suggest that these results are robust against changes in the gas physical modeling, in particular to the inclusion of AGN thermal feedback. Our findings support the view that the observed core cluster morphology emerges naturally in a merging cluster context, and conclude that the merging angular momentum is a key parameter in shaping the thermodynamical properties of the final merger remnant.