High-Resolution X-Ray Spectroscopic Constraints on Cooling-Flow Models for Clusters of Galaxies

We present high-resolution X-ray spectra of 14 putative cooling-flow clusters of galaxies obtained with the Reflection Grating Spectrometer on XMM-Newton. The clusters in the sample span a large range of temperatures and mass deposition rates. Various of these spectra exhibit line emission from O VIII, Ne X, Mg XII and XI, Al XIII and XII, Si XIV and XIII, N VII, and C VI as well as all Fe L ions. The spectra exhibit strong emission from cool plasma at just below the ambient temperature, T₀, down to T₀/2, but also exhibit a severe deficit of emission relative to the predictions of the isobaric cooling-flow model at lower temperatures (<T₀/3). In addition, the best-resolved spectra show emission throughout the entire X-ray temperature range, but increasingly less emission at lower temperatures than the cooling-flow model would predict. These results are difficult to reconcile with simple prescriptions for distorting the emission measure distribution, e.g., by including additional heating or rapid cooling terms. We enumerate some theoretical difficulties in understanding the soft X-ray spectra of cooling flows independent of the classic problem of the failure to detect the cooling-flow sink. Empirically, the differential luminosity distribution is consistent with being proportional to the temperature to the power of ~1-2, instead of being independent of the temperature, as expected in the standard multiphase model. The primary differences in the observed low-temperature spectra are ascribed to differences in the ambient temperature.