The X-ray Coronae of two massive galaxies in the core of the Perseus cluster

Abstract

We study the X-ray properties of two elliptical galaxies, NGC 1270 and NGC 1272, in the core of the Perseus cluster with deep Chandra observations. Both galaxies have central supermassive black holes, the mass of which is $6.0\times 10^9$ M${}_{\odot }$ and $2.0\times 10^9$ M${}_{\odot }$ respectively. Our aim is to examine relatively cool soft X-ray emitting gas within the central region of these massive early-type galaxies. Such gas, referred to as a Minicorona in previous studies is common in the core of large elliptical cluster galaxies. It has not been completely stripped or evaporated by the surrounding hot intracluster medium and nor fully accreted onto the central black hole. With thermal emission from the minicorona dominating over any power-law radiation components, we find that both NGC 1270 and NGC 1272 encompass minicoronae, the temperature and radius of which are $0.99$ keV and $0.63$ keV; $1.4$ kpc and $1.2$ kpc respectively. For NGC 1272, the thermal coronal component dominates the core emission by a factor of over 10. We show that the depletion time scale of minicoronal gas via viscous stripping is shorter by a factor of $100$ than the replenishment time scale due to stellar mass loss. Magnetic fields are presumably responsible for suppression of the transport processes. Finally, we show that both objects have to meet a balance between cooling and heating as well as that among mass replenishment, stripping and accretion.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS; 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (5)

• Simultaneous X-ray/optical/UV snapshots of active galactic nuclei from XMM-Newton: spectral energy distributions for the reverberation mapped sample
• An Over-Massive Black Hole in the Compact Lenticular Galaxy NGC1277
• X-ray thermal coronae of galaxies in hot clusters -- ubiquity of embedded mini cooling cores
• X-ray active galactic nuclei in the core of the Perseus cluster
• Bent Radio Jets Reveal a Stripped Interstellar Medium in NGC 1272

Cited by in corpus (2)

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