Enhancing AGN efficiency and cool-core formation with anisotropic thermal conduction

Understand

Understanding how baryonic processes shape the intracluster medium (ICM) is of critical importance to the next generation of galaxy cluster surveys.

• However, most models of structure formation neglect potentially important physical processes, like anisotropic thermal conduction (ATC).
• In this letter, we explore the impact of ATC on the prevalence of cool-cores (CCs) using 12 pairs of magnetohydrodynamical galaxy cluster simulations, simulated using the IllustrisTNG model with and without ATC.
• Although the impact of ATC varies from cluster to cluster and with CC criterion, its inclusion produces a systematic shift to larger CC fractions at z = 0 for all CC criteria considered.