Shattering and growth of cold clouds in galaxy clusters: the role of radiative cooling, magnetic fields and thermal conduction

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to explore how cold clouds in galaxy clusters evolve, focusing on the effects of cooling, magnetic fields, and thermal conduction, revealing their potential to grow and persist within the hot intracluster medium.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the long-term evolution of cold clouds in galaxy clusters, highlighting the roles of magnetic fields and thermal conduction in cloud growth and stability.

Findings

Cold clouds shatter into smaller clumps, promoting further condensation.

Magnetic fields slow but do not prevent cloud growth.

Anisotropic thermal conduction enhances cold gas accumulation.

Abstract

In galaxy clusters, the hot intracluster medium (ICM) can develop a striking multi-phase structure around the brightest cluster galaxy. Much work has been done on understanding the origin of this central nebula, but less work has studied its eventual fate after the originally filamentary structure is broken into individual cold clumps. In this paper we perform a suite of 30 (magneto-)hydrodynamical simulations of kpc-scale cold clouds with typical parameters as found by galaxy cluster simulations, to understand whether clouds are mixed back into the hot ICM or can persist. We investigate the effects of radiative cooling, small-scale heating, magnetic fields, and (anisotropic) thermal conduction on the long-term evolution of clouds. We find that filament fragments cool on timescales shorter than the crushing timescale, fall out of pressure equilibrium with the hot medium, and shatter, forming smaller clumplets. These act as nucleation sites for further condensation, and mixing via Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, causing cold gas mass to double within 75 Myr. Cloud growth depends on density, as well as on local heating processes, which determine whether clouds undergo ablation- or shattering-driven evolution. Magnetic fields slow down but don't prevent cloud growth, with the evolution of both cold and warm phase sensitive to the field topology. Counter-intuitively, anisotropic thermal conduction increases the cold gas growth rate compared to non-conductive clouds, leading to larger amounts of warm phase as well. We conclude that dense clumps on scales of $500$ pc or more cannot be ignored when studying the long-term cooling flow evolution of galaxy clusters.