Turbulence in the intracluster medium: Simulations, observables, and thermodynamics

Abstract

We conduct two kinds of homogeneous isotropic turbulence simulations relevant for the intracluster medium (ICM): (i) pure turbulence runs without radiative cooling and (ii) turbulent heating + radiative cooling runs with global thermal balance. For pure turbulence runs in the subsonic regime, the rms density and surface brightness (SB) fluctuations vary as the square of the rms Mach number (Mrms). However, with thermal balance, the density and SB fluctuations (δSB/SB) are much larger. These scalings have implications for translating SB fluctuations into a turbulent velocity, particularly for cool cores. For thermal balance runs with large (cluster core) scale driving, both the hot and cold phases of the gas are supersonic. For small-scale (one order of magnitude smaller than the cluster core) driving, multiphase gas forms on a much longer time-scale but Mrms is smaller. Both small- and large-scale driving runs have velocities larger than the Hitomi results from the Perseus cluster. Thus, turbulent heating as the dominant heating source in cool cluster cores is ruled out if multiphase gas is assumed to condense out from the ICM. Next we perform thermal balance runs in which we partition the input energy into thermal and turbulent parts and tune their relative magnitudes. The contribution of turbulent heating has to be 10 per cent in order for turbulence velocities to match Hitomi observations. If the dominant source of multiphase gas is not cooling from the ICM (but say uplift from the central galaxy), the importance of turbulent heating cannot be excluded.