No Arabic abstract
This contribution summarizes the splinter session Non-thermal processes in coronae and beyond held at the Cool Stars 17 workshop in Barcelona in 2012. It covers new developments in high energy non-thermal effects in the Earths exosphere, solar and stellar flares, the diffuse emission in star forming regions and reviews the state and the challenges of the underlying atomic databases.
{bf Context.} Numerical models of the evolution of interstellar and integalactic plasmas often assume that the adiabatic parameter $gamma$ (the ratio of the specific heats) is constant (5/3 in monoatomic plasmas). However, $gamma$ is determined by the total internal energy of the plasma, which depends on the ionic and excitation state of the plasma. Hence, the adiabatic parameter may not be constant across the range of temperatures available in the interstellar medium. {bf Aims.} We aim to carry out detailed simulations of the thermal evolution of plasmas with Maxwell-Boltzmann and non-thermal ($kappa$ and $n$) electron distributions in order to determine the temperature variability of the total internal energy and of the adiabatic parameter. {bf Methods.} The plasma, composed of H, He, C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, and Fe atoms and ions, evolves under collisional ionization equilibrium conditions, from an initial temperature of $10^9$ K. The calculations include electron impact ionization, radiative and dielectronic recombinations and line excitation. The ionization structure was calculated (...) using the Gauss elimination method with scaled partial pivoting. Numerical integrations (...) were carried out using the double-exponential over a semi-finite interval method. In both methods a precision of $10^{-15}$ is adopted. {bf Results.} The total internal energy of the plasma is mainly dominated by the ionization energy for temperatures lower than $8times 10^4$ K with the excitation energy having a contribution of less than one percent. In thermal and non-thermal plasmas composed of H, He, and metals, the adiabatic parameter evolution is determined by the H and He ionizations leading to a profile in general having three transitions. However, for $kappa$ distributed plasmas these three transitions are not observed for $kappa<15$ (...). In general, $gamma$ varies from 1.01 to 5/3.
We present a deep radio-polarimetric observation of the stellar bow shock EB27 associated to the massive star BD+43 3654. This is the only stellar bow shock confirmed to have non-thermal radio emission. We used the Jansky Very Large Array in S band (2 - 4GHz) to test whether this synchrotron emission is polarised. The unprecedented sensitivity achieved allowed us to map even the fainter regions of the bow shock, revealing that the more diffuse emission is steeper and the bow shock brighter than previously reported. No linear polarisation is detected in the bow shock above 0.5%, although we detected polarised emission from two southern sources, probably extragalactic in nature. We modeled the intensity and morphology of the radio emission to better constrain the magnetic field and injected power in relativistic electrons. Finally, we derived a set of more precise parameters for the system EB27-BD+43 3654 using Gaia Early Data Release 3, including the spatial velocity. The new trajectory, back in time, intersects the core of the Cyg OB2 association.
We simulate anisotropic thermal conduction between the intracluster medium (ICM) and the hot coronal interstellar medium (ISM) gas in cluster galaxies. In the earlier Paper I (Vijayaraghavan & Sarazin 2017a), we simulated the evaporation of the hot ISM due to isotropic (possibly saturated) conduction between the ISM and ICM. We found that hot coronae evaporate on $sim 10^2$ Myr timescales, significantly shorter than the $sim 10^3$ Myr gas loss times due to ram pressure stripping. No tails of stripped gas are formed. This is in tension with the observed ubiquity and implied longevity of compact X-ray coronae and stripped ISM tails, and requires the suppression of evaporation, possibly due to magnetic fields and anisotropic conduction. We perform a series of wind tunnel simulations similar to Paper I, now including ISM and ICM magnetic fields. We simulate the effect of anisotropic conduction for a range of extreme magnetic field configurations: parallel and perpendicular to the ICM wind, and continuous and completely disjoint between the ISM and ICM. We find that when conduction is anisotropic, gas loss due to evaporation is severely reduced; the overall gas loss rates with and without anisotropic conduction do not differ by more than $10 - 20%$. Magnetic fields also prevent stripped tails from evaporating in the ICM by shielding, and providing few pathways for heat transport between the ICM and ISM. The morphology of stripped tails and magnetic fields in the tails and wakes of galaxies are sensitive to the initial magnetic field configuration.
Galaxy clusters are the endpoints of structure formation and are continuously growing through the merging and accretion of smaller structures. Numerical simulations predict that a fraction of their energy content is not yet thermalized, mainly in the form of kinetic motions (turbulence, bulk motions). Measuring the level of non-thermal pressure support is necessary to understand the processes leading to the virialization of the gas within the potential well of the main halo and to calibrate the biases in hydrostatic mass estimates. We present high-quality measurements of hydrostatic masses and intracluster gas fraction out to the virial radius for a sample of 12 nearby clusters with available XMM-Newton and Planck data. We compare our hydrostatic gas fractions with the expected universal gas fraction to constrain the level of non-thermal pressure support. We find that hydrostatic masses require little correction and infer a median non-thermal pressure fraction of $sim6%$ and $sim10%$ at $R_{500}$ and $R_{200}$, respectively. Our values are lower than the expectations of hydrodynamical simulations, possibly implying a faster thermalization of the gas. If instead we use the mass calibration adopted by the Planck team, we find that the gas fraction of massive local systems implies a mass bias $1-b=0.85pm0.05$ for SZ-derived masses, with some evidence for a mass-dependent bias. Conversely, the high bias required to match Planck CMB and cluster count cosmology is excluded by the data at high significance, unless the most massive halos are missing a substantial fraction of their baryons.
The Peccei-Quinn mechanism presents a neat solution to the strong CP problem. As a by-product, it provides an ideal dark matter candidate, the axion, albeit with a tiny mass. Axions therefore can act as dark radiation if excited with large momenta after the end of inflation. Nevertheless, the recent measurement of relativistic degrees of freedom from cosmic microwave background radiation strictly constrains the abundance of such extra relativistic species. We show that ultra-relativistic axions can be abundantly produced if the Peccei-Quinn field was initially displaced from the minimum of the potential. This in lieu places an interesting constraint on the axion dark matter window with large decay constant which is expected to be probed by future experiments. Moreover, an upper bound on the reheating temperature can be placed, which further constrains the thermal history of our Universe.