Abstract
Feedback from AGN, galactic mergers, and sloshing are thought to give rise to
turbulence, which may prevent cooling in clusters. We aim to measure the
turbulence in clusters of galaxies and compare the measurements to some of
their structural and evolutionary properties. It is possible to measure the
turbulence of the hot gas in clusters by estimating the velocity widths of
their X-ray emission lines. The RGS Spectrometers aboard XMM-Newton are
currently the only instruments provided with sufficient effective area and
spectral resolution in this energy domain. We benefited from excellent 1.6Ms
new data provided by the CHEERS project. The new observations improve the
quality of the archival data and allow us to place constraints for some
clusters, which were not accessible in previous work. One-half of the sample
shows upper limits on turbulence less than 500km/s. For several sources, our
data are consistent with relatively strong turbulence with upper limits on the
velocity widths that are larger than 1000km/s. The NGC507 group of galaxies
shows transonic velocities, which are most likely associated with the merging
phenomena and bulk motions occurring in this object. Where both low- and
high-ionization emission lines have good enough statistics, we find larger
upper limits for the hot gas, which is partly due to the different spatial
extents of the hot and cool gas phases. Our upper limits are larger than the
Mach numbers required to balance cooling, suggesting that dissipation of
turbulence may prevent cooling, although other heating processes could be
dominant. The systematics associated with the spatial profile of the source
continuum make this technique very challenging, though still powerful, for
current instruments. The ASTRO-H and Athena missions will revolutionize the
velocity estimates and discriminate between different spatial regions and
temperature phases.
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