The magnetised and thermally unstable tails of jellyfish galaxies

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sparre, Martin, Pfrommer, Christoph, Puchwein, Ewald
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915028101234688
author Sparre, Martin
Pfrommer, Christoph
Puchwein, Ewald
author_facet Sparre, Martin
Pfrommer, Christoph
Puchwein, Ewald
contents Jellyfish galaxies are promising laboratories for studying radiative cooling and magnetic fields in multiphase gas flows. Their long, dense tails are observed to be magnetised, and they extend up to 100 kpc into the intracluster medium (ICM), suggesting that their gas is thermally unstable so that the cold gas mass grows with time rather than being fully dissolved in the hot wind as a result of hydrodynamical interface instabilities. In this paper we use the AREPO code to perform magnetohydrodynamical windtunnel simulations of a jellyfish galaxy experiencing ram-pressure stripping by interacting with an ICM wind. The ICM density, temperature and velocity that the galaxy encounters are time-dependent and comparable to what a real jellyfish galaxy experiences while orbiting the ICM. In simulations with a turbulent magnetised wind we reproduce observations, which show that the magnetic field is aligned with the jellyfish tails. During the galaxy infall into the cluster with a near edge-on geometry, the gas flow in the tail is fountain-like, implying preferential stripping of gas where the rotational velocity vectors add up with the ram pressure while fall-back occurs in the opposite case. Hence, the tail velocity shows a memory of the rotation pattern of the disc. At the time of the nearest cluster passage, ram-pressure stripping is so strong that the fountain flow is destroyed and instead the tail is dominated by removal of gas. We show that gas in the tail is very fragmentative, which is a prediction of shattering due to radiative cooling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_05679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The magnetised and thermally unstable tails of jellyfish galaxies
Sparre, Martin
Pfrommer, Christoph
Puchwein, Ewald
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Jellyfish galaxies are promising laboratories for studying radiative cooling and magnetic fields in multiphase gas flows. Their long, dense tails are observed to be magnetised, and they extend up to 100 kpc into the intracluster medium (ICM), suggesting that their gas is thermally unstable so that the cold gas mass grows with time rather than being fully dissolved in the hot wind as a result of hydrodynamical interface instabilities. In this paper we use the AREPO code to perform magnetohydrodynamical windtunnel simulations of a jellyfish galaxy experiencing ram-pressure stripping by interacting with an ICM wind. The ICM density, temperature and velocity that the galaxy encounters are time-dependent and comparable to what a real jellyfish galaxy experiences while orbiting the ICM. In simulations with a turbulent magnetised wind we reproduce observations, which show that the magnetic field is aligned with the jellyfish tails. During the galaxy infall into the cluster with a near edge-on geometry, the gas flow in the tail is fountain-like, implying preferential stripping of gas where the rotational velocity vectors add up with the ram pressure while fall-back occurs in the opposite case. Hence, the tail velocity shows a memory of the rotation pattern of the disc. At the time of the nearest cluster passage, ram-pressure stripping is so strong that the fountain flow is destroyed and instead the tail is dominated by removal of gas. We show that gas in the tail is very fragmentative, which is a prediction of shattering due to radiative cooling.
title The magnetised and thermally unstable tails of jellyfish galaxies
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05679