Clusters of Galaxies: Beyond the Thermal View

ISBN-13: 9781441927026 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 418 str.

Jelle Kaastra

Opis

The existence of soft excess emission originating from clusters of galaxies, de ned as em- sion detected below 1 keV in excess over the usual thermal emission from hot intracluster gas (hereafter the ICM) has been claimed since 1996. Soft excesses are particularly - portant to detect because they may (at least partly) be due to thermal emission from the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, where as much as half of the baryons of the Universe could be. They are therefore of fundamental cosmological importance. Soft excess emission has been observed (and has also given rise to controversy) in a number of clusters, mainly raising the following questions: (1) Do clusters really show a soft excess? (2) If so, from what spatial region(s) of the cluster does the soft excess or- inate? (3) Is this excess emission thermal, originating from warm-hot intergalactic gas (at 6 temperatures of?10 K), or non-thermal, in which case several emission mechanisms have been proposed. Interestingly, some of the non-thermal mechanisms suggested to account for soft excess emission can also explain the hard X-ray emission detected in some clusters, for example by RXTE and BeppoSAX (also see Petrosian et al. 2008 Chap. 10, this issue; Rephaeli et al. 2008 Chap. 5, this issue)."

Spis treści

Clusters of Galaxies: Beyond the Thermal View.- Clusters of Galaxies: Setting the Stage.- FUV and X-Ray Absorption in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium.- Soft X-Ray and Extreme Ultraviolet Excess Emission from Clusters of Galaxies.- Nonthermal Phenomena in Clusters of Galaxies.- Observations of Extended Radio Emission in Clusters.- Cosmological Shock Waves.- Equilibration Processes in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium.- Thermal Radiation Processes.- Nonthermal Radiation Mechanisms.- Particle Acceleration Mechanisms.- Simulation Techniques for Cosmological Simulations.- Thermodynamical Properties of the ICM from Hydrodynamical Simulations.- Numerical Simulations of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium.- Non-Thermal Processes in Cosmological Simulations.- Observations of Metals in the Intra-Cluster Medium.- Metal Enrichment Processes.- The Chemical Enrichment of the ICM from Hydrodynamical Simulations.- Future Instrumentation for the Study of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium.

O autorze

sronl.nl.~kaastra/ 

Jelle Kaastra studied astrophysics at Utrecht University. He obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy in 1985 with a thesis on Solar flares. After that he joined the Netherlands Institute for Space Research SRON, first in Leiden, and from 1994 in Utrecht, where he currently is employed as a senior scientist. He is an expert on high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy and currently works on a variety of topics in this field, including clusters of galaxies.

Blurb

Clusters of galaxies are the largest structures in the Universe. Most of the visible matter is in the form of hot gas permeating the volume of the cluster. The bulk of this gas is in thermal equilibrium in the dark matter-dominated potential. This book discusses all aspects of cluster physics beyond this thermal view. It covers topics such as the warm-hot intergalactic medium outside the clusters, non-thermal radiation components, shocks, equilibration processes and the chemical evolution of these structures. The topics are covered from an observational, theoretical and numerical point of view.

This volume provides a useful reference for astronomers and graduate students, in particular for those who are working in high-energy astrophysics and extra-galactic astronomy.