Powering The Intra-cluster Filaments in Cool-Core Clusters of Galaxies

Understand

The first radio surveys of the sky discovered that some large clusters of galaxies contained powerful sources of synchrotron emission.

• Optical images showed that long linear filaments with bizarre emission-line spectra permeated the intra-cluster medium.
• Recent observations in the infrared and radio show that these filaments have very strong emission lines of molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
• The mass of molecular material is quite large, the gas is quite warm, and the filaments have not formed stars despite their ~Gyr age.