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Caltech

TAPIR Seminar

Friday, October 25, 2013
2:00pm to 3:00pm
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Cahill 370
Do Galaxy Clusters Boil?
Mike McCourt, Graduate Student, Astronomy Department, U.C. Berkeley,

The hot plasma filling galaxy clusters is susceptible to a convective MHD instability known as the MTI. 
Understanding the implications of this convection has been surprisingly difficult, however; it depends
on both the large-scale evolution of the cluster and on the plasma physics of the gas.  I will describe
a new set of "semi-cosmological" simulations which capture enough of the cosmic evolution of galaxy
clusters to reproduce their large-scale properties but still provide an idealized environment in which to
study cluster convection and its implications.

For more information, please contact JoAnn Boyd by phone at 4280 or by email at [email protected].