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Register a new userStabilizing effect of magnetic helicity on magnetic cavities in the intergalactic medium
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We investigate the effect of magnetic helicity on the stability of buoyant magnetic cavities as found in the intergalactic medium. In these cavities, we insert helical magnetic fields and test whether or not helicity can increase their stability to shredding through the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and, with that, their lifetime. This is compared to the case of an external vertical magnetic field which is known to reduce the growth rate of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. By comparing a low-helicity configuration with a high helicity one with the same magnetic energy we find that an internal helical magnetic field stabilizes the cavity. This effect increases as we increase the helicity content. Stabilizing the cavity with an external magnetic field requires instead a significantly stronger field at higher magnetic energy. We conclude that the presence of helical magnetic fields is a viable mechanism to explain the stability of intergalactic cavities on time scales longer than 100 Myr.
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The presence of ubiquitous magnetic fields in the universe is suggested from observations of radiation and cosmic ray from galaxies or the intergalactic medium (IGM). One possible origin of cosmic magnetic fields is the magnetogenesis in the primordial universe. Such magnetic fields are called primordial magnetic fields (PMFs), and are considered to affect the evolution of matter density fluctuations and the thermal history of the IGM gas. Hence the information of PMFs is expected to be imprinted on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect in the IGM. In this study, given an initial power spectrum of PMFs as $P(k)propto B_{rm 1Mpc}^2 k^{n_{B}}$, we calculate dynamical and thermal evolutions of the IGM under the influence of PMFs, and compute the resultant angular power spectrum of the Compton $y$-parameter on the sky. As a result, we find that two physical processes driven by PMFs dominantly determine the power spectrum of the Compton $y$-parameter; (i) the heating due to the ambipolar diffusion effectively works to increase the temperature and the ionization fraction, and (ii) the Lorentz force drastically enhances the density contrast just after the recombination epoch. These facts result in making the tSZ angular power spectrum induced by the PMFs more remarkable at $ell >10^4$ than that by galaxy clusters even with $B_{rm 1Mpc}=0.1$ nG and $n_{B}=-1.0$ because the contribution from galaxy clusters decreases with increasing $ell$. The measurement of the tSZ angular power spectrum on high $ell$ modes can provide the stringent constraint on PMFs.
We study the effect of magnetic fields on a simulated galaxy and its surrounding gaseous halo, or circumgalactic medium (CGM), within cosmological zoom-in simulations of a Milky Way-mass galaxy as part of the Simulating the Universe with Refined Galaxy Environments (SURGE) project. We use three different galaxy formation models, each with and without magnetic fields, and include additional spatial refinement in the CGM to improve its resolution. The central galaxys star formation rate and stellar mass are not strongly affected by the presence of magnetic fields, but the galaxy is more disc-dominated and its central black hole is more massive when $B>0$. The physical properties of the CGM change significantly. With magnetic fields, the circumgalactic gas flows are slower, the atomic hydrogen-dominated extended discs around the galaxy are more massive and the densities in the inner CGM are therefore higher, the temperatures in the outer CGM are higher, and the pressure in the halo is higher and smoother. The total gas fraction and metal mass fraction in the halo are also higher when magnetic fields are included, because less gas escapes the halo. Additionally, we find that the CGM properties depend on azimuthal angle and that magnetic fields reduce the scatter in radial velocity, whilst enhancing the scatter in metallicity at fixed azimuthal angle. The metals are thus less well-mixed throughout the halo, resulting in more metal-poor halo gas. These results together show that magnetic fields in the CGM change the flow of gas in galaxy haloes, making it more difficult for metal-rich outflows to mix with the metal-poor CGM and to escape the halo, and therefore should be included in simulations of galaxy formation.
Magnetic helicity fluxes in turbulently driven alpha^2 dynamos are studied to demonstrate their ability to alleviate catastrophic quenching. A one-dimensional mean-field formalism is used to achieve magnetic Reynolds numbers of the order of 10^5. We study both diffusive magnetic helicity fluxes through the mid-plane as well as those resulting from the recently proposed alternate dynamic quenching formalism. By adding shear we make a parameter scan for the critical values of the shear and forcing parameters for which dynamo action occurs. For this $alphaOmega$ dynamo we find that the preferred mode is antisymmetric about the mid-plane. This is also verified in 3-D direct numerical simulations.
We search for observational signatures of magnetic helicity in data from all-sky radio polarization surveys of the Milky Way Galaxy. Such a detection would help confirm the dynamo origin of the field and may provide new observational constraints for its shape. We compare our observational results to simulated observations for both a simple helical field, and for a more complex field that comes from a solution to the dynamo equation. Our simulated observations show that the large-scale helicity of a magnetic field is reflected in the large-scale structure of the fractional polarization derived from the observed synchrotron radiation and Faraday depth of the diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission. Comparing the models with the observations provides evidence for the presence of a quadrupolar magnetic field with a vertical component that is pointing away from the observer in both hemispheres of the Milky Way Galaxy. Since there is no reason to believe that the Galactic magnetic field is unusual when compared to other galaxies, this result provides further support for the dynamo origin of large-scale magnetic fields in galaxies.
We examine the thermal energy contents of the intergalactic medium (IGM) over three orders of magnitude in both mass density and gas temperature using thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (tSZE). The analysis is based on {it Planck} tSZE map and the cosmic density field, reconstructed for the SDSS DR7 volume and sampled on a grid of cubic cells of $(1h^{-1}{rm Mpc})^3$, together with a matched filter technique employed to maximize the signal-to-noise. Our results show that the pressure - density relation of the IGM is roughly a power law given by an adiabatic equation of state, with an indication of steepening at densities higher than about $10$ times the mean density of the universe. The implied average gas temperature is $sim 10^4,{rm K}$ in regions of mean density, $rho_{rm m} sim {overlinerho}_{rm m}$, increasing to about $10^5,{rm K}$ for $rho_{rm m} sim 10,{overlinerho}_{rm m}$, and to $>10^{6},{rm K}$ for $rho_{rm m} sim 100,{overlinerho}_{rm m}$. At a given density, the thermal energy content of the IGM is also found to be higher in regions of stronger tidal fields, likely due to shock heating by the formation of large scale structure and/or feedback from galaxies and AGNs. A comparison of the results with hydrodynamic simulations suggests that the current data can already provide interesting constraints on galaxy formation.
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