ASD Special Seminar
Thursday · 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Reigniting the FUSE: A Modern Reanalysis of the Cooling Flow Problem with Archival UV Spectroscopy
Michael Reefe
Abstract: The “cooling flow problem“ refers to the discrepancy between the cooling rates of gas in the hot intracluster/circumgalactic medium and star formation rates in the central galaxy. This ~2 orders of magnitude disagreement have been explained by feedback from an active galactic nucleus, which reheats and redistributes the gas. While the evidence for AGN feedback is compelling, many details of the cooling and feedback cycle remain elusive. A promising avenue for studying cooling processes at a finer detail is through “coronal” emission lines, which probe gas at intermediate temperatures (between the hot gas and the star formation). In this talk, I will present the results of a comprehensive archival study of 29 massive elliptical galaxies observed by FUSE. This far-ultraviolet spectroscopy has been re-analyzed with modern methods, in tandem with broadband photometry in the optical to IR. These data provide the strongest constraints to date on (i) the metallicity of the young, still-forming stellar populations in massive galaxies, (ii) the rate of star formation in massive galaxies, and the likely origin for the star-forming gas, and (iii) the cooling rate out of the hot phase via the OVI emission line doublet. Additionally, a new collection of high-resolution UV stellar templates, necessitated by this project, has been ported to the popular stellar population synthesis code FSPS and made publicly available.