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High velocity clouds interacting with galactic halo plasma as a source of X-ray emission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2005

B. J. KELLETT  and
R. BINGHAM
B. J. KELLETT
Affiliation:
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK ([email protected])
R. BINGHAM
Affiliation:
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK ([email protected]) Physics Department, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland
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Abstract

Several high velocity clouds (HVCs) are now known to be soft X-ray sources. In this paper we suggest that an interaction between the HVCs and the galactic halo is leading to plasma instabilities that generate energetic electrons which in turn generate X-ray emission. This process is essentially analogous to the interaction process between comets and non-magnetized planets with the solar wind which is also known to lead to the generation of X-rays. We show that for reasonable assumptions about the galactic halo magnetic field, the X-ray emission can be converted into an estimate of the mean galactic halo density at the position of the cloud. This provides a method for estimating the baryonic mass of the plasma halo provided that we can obtain a good estimate for the distance to the HVC.

Type
Papers
Information
Journal of Plasma Physics , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 111 - 118
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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