Microscale physics of intergalactic plasma in clusters of galaxies

Wednesday, April 17, 2019 11:30 am - 11:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Astronomy Lunch Series

Irina Zhuravleva (Chicago)

Clusters of galaxies are the largest and most massive systems in the Universe. Most baryonic matter in such systems is in a form of very hot, X-ray emitting gas. Such gas is almost fully ionized, has very low density and is weakly magnetized. The large sizes of the clusters make them unique laboratories to probe plasma properties on microscales. These properties are largely unknown, however, are important for understanding many astrophysical phenomena and their numerical modeling. In my talk, I will present the studies of intracluster turbulence in the cores of galaxy clusters that are affected by feedback from active galactic nuclei, the equation of state of gas perturbations, and recent efforts to directly probe transport processes in the bulk gas by measuring plasma properties on mean free path scale. These measurements are mainly based on deep observations of galaxy clusters with the Chandra observatory and the statistical analysis of gas perturbations imprinted in high-resolution X-ray images. At the end of my talk, I will briefly discuss the future perspectives of the field.