Suppression of thermal conduction in non-cooling flow clusters

Abstract

Recent X-ray observations have revealed a universal temperature profile of the intracluster gas of non-cooling flow clusters which is flat for r \le 0.2 r_{180}. Numerical simulations, however, obtain a steeper temperature profile in the inner region. We study the effect of thermal conduction on the intracluster gas in non-cooling flow clusters in light of these observations, using the steep temperature profiles obtained by authors of numerical simulations. We find that given 10^{10} yr for the intracluster gas to evolve, thermal conduction should be suppressed from the classical value by a factor \sim 10^{-3} in order to explain the observations.

5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS (pink pages)