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FOGGIE V. The Virial Temperature Does Not Describe Gas in a Virialized Galaxy Halo

This video describes the main results from Lochhaas et al. (2021, ApJ, 922, 121)

Published onDec 20, 2021
FOGGIE V. The Virial Temperature Does Not Describe Gas in a Virialized Galaxy Halo

This video describes the main result from a paper we recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.[1] Using the FOGGIE high-resolution cosmological simulations of a handful of Milky Way-mass galaxies, we found that the commonly assumed virial temperature does not describe the gas temperature of the circumgalactic medium in the simulations. The reason for this discrepancy is the significant amount of non-thermal kinetic energy in the gas, such that the assumption that the gas is fully thermalized does not hold. We derived an analogous “modified virial temperature” that includes the non-thermal gas motions and show that this modified virial temperature does a much better job of describing the simulated gas temperature.

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