Heating the intergalactic medium by radiative decay of neutrinos

Abstract

Assuming that there exists a species of heavy sterile neutrinos($m_{\nu }>1$ keV) and their decays can serve as a heating source of the hot gas in galaxy clusters, we study how the observational constraints on cooling flow limit the mass of these sterile neutrinos. We predict a relation among the luminosity, total mass and the redshift of a cluster, and we compare this relation with data from 12 clusters to obtain an estimate of the decay rate of the sterile neutrino.

15 pages, 4 figures

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Observational evidences for the existence of 17.4 keV decaying degenerate sterile neutrinos near the Galactic Center
• Decaying Sterile Neutrinos as a Heating Source in the Milky Way Center
• The Existence of Sterile Neutrino Halos in Galactic Centers as an Explanation of the Black Hole mass - Velocity Dispersion Relation
• A Predicted Relation between the Temperature and Density Profile of Cluster Hot Gas
• Electron-positron Annihilation Lines and Decaying Sterile Neutrinos