Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, October 28th, 2021
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Probing Dynamic Intracluster Medium: Insights from X-ray Surface Brightness Fluctuations
- Time: 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall, Coffee and Cookies at 3:30 pm, Talk starts at 3:45 pm
- Speaker: Irina Zhuravleva , University of Chicago
- Abstract: Clusters of galaxies are mainly filled with dark matter and hot, X-ray emitting gas. They evolve through matter accretion along cosmic filaments, violent mergers, feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN). Despite being very dynamic environments, the processes that drive gas motions in the intracluster medium (ICM), the properties of turbulence and relevant plasma physics remain poorly explored. In this talk, I will mainly focus on observational efforts to probe these physics. A recent analysis of X-ray surface brightness fluctuations in the central regions of bright, nearby galaxy clusters provided constraints on velocity power spectra, effective equation of state of small-scale perturbations produced by AGN feedback, and directly probed how magnetic fields modify small-scale density perturbations of the gas, affecting its transport properties. At the end of the talk, exciting possibilities to probe gas motions and plasma physics in the ICM with near-future XRISM observatory will be discussed.
We strongly encourage you to attend the colloquium in person. If that is impossible, it is available over zoom at the following link: