Papers › Directly Imaging the Cooling Flow in the Phoenix Cluster
Directly Imaging the Cooling Flow in the Phoenix Cluster
Michael Reefe, Michael McDonald, Marios Chatzikos, Jerome Seebeck, Richard Mushotzky, Sylvain Veilleux, Steven Allen, Matthew Bayliss, Michael Calzadilla, Rebecca Canning, Benjamin Floyd, Massimo Gaspari, Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, Brian McNamara, Helen Russell, Keren Sharon, Taweewat Somboonpanyakul
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In the centers of many galaxy clusters, the hot (∼10⁷ K) intracluster medium (ICM) can become dense enough that it should cool on short timescales. However, the low measured star formation rates in massive central galaxies and absence of soft X-ray lines from cooling gas suggest that most of this gas never cools - this is known as the "cooling flow problem." The latest observations suggest that black hole jets are maintaining the vast majority of gas at high temperatures. A cooling flow has yet to be fully mapped through all gas phases in any galaxy cluster. Here, we present new observations of the Phoenix cluster using the James Webb Space Telescope to map the [Ne VI] λ7.652μm emission line, allowing us to probe gas at 10^(5.5) K on large scales. These data show extended [Ne VI] emission cospatial with (i) the cooling peak in the ICM, (ii) the coolest gas phases, and (iii) sites of active star formation. Taken together, these imply a recent episode of rapid cooling, causing a short-lived spike in the cooling rate which we estimate to be 5,000-23,000 M_⊙ yr⁻¹. These data provide the first large-scale map of gas at temperatures between 10⁵-10⁶ K in a cluster core, and highlight the critical role that black hole feedback plays in not only regulating but also promoting cooling.
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