CFHT UM2025 - Presentation Details
Abstract Details
Title: A novel view of filaments in cooling flow clusters with SITELLE
Presenter: Marie-Lou Gendron-Marsolais
Abstract:
Brightest clusters galaxies (BCG) lie in special environments and therefore show unique characteristics, such as the ubiquitous presence of extended filamentary optical emission-line nebulae. Significant progress has been made in the last few years on our comprehension of the origin of this ionized gas thanks to game-changing observations with optical Integral Field Units which provide both spectroscopically and spatially resolved information from the emission lines. We now interpret those filaments as part of multi-phase structures that appears to be the missing key of a self-regulated feedback loop between the cooling of the intra-cluster medium and the heating from the central AGN. In this talk, I will present how the SITELLE observations of the most extended known case of such nebula (NGC 1275, the BCG of the notorious Perseus cluster) have led to novel ways of analyzing those structures and interpreting them. Through velocity structure functions, these data were used to characterize the principal motion-driver of the filaments - potentially the central supermassive black hole. Using a novel imaging decomposition method, the X-ray surface brightness of these filaments have also been successfully isolated for the first time, leading to the discovery of a tight correlation between the hot and warm gas phases in 7 strong cooling flow clusters, including Perseus.