Suppression of thermal conduction in non-cooling flow clusters

Abstract

Recent X-ray observations have revealed a universal temperature profile for the intracluster gas of non-cooling flow clusters which is flat for r<= 0.2r180. 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 numerical simulations. We find that, given 1010 yr for the intracluster gas to evolve, thermal conduction should be suppressed from the classical value by a factor of ~10-3 in order to explain the observations.