Cooling flows, central galaxy-cluster alignments, X-ray absorption and dust

Abstract

We present the analysis of pointed ROSAT Position Sensitive Proportional Counter (PSPC) observations of five of the most luminous, intermediate-redshift (0.1 <zROSAT All-Sky Survey. The PSPC data are combined with optical CCD images and spectra to examine the relationship between clusters and their central cluster galaxies (CCGs). Abell 1068, Abell 1361 and Abell 1664 contain three of the most optically line-luminous CCGs known. The PSPC X-ray data show that these galaxies lie at the centres of massive (200–400 M_⊙ yr^–1 cooling flows. The alignment between CCGs and their host clusters has been investigated. For those clusters with cooling flows, the position angles of the X-ray emission from the clusters and the optical emission from the CCGs agrees within 5°. For the one probable non-cooling flow cluster in the sample, Abell 2208, the alignment is significantly poorer. We examine the evidence for intrinsic X-ray absorption in the clusters. The X-ray spectra for Abell 1068 and Abell 1664 show that the cooling flows in these clusters are intrinsically absorbed by equivalent hydrogen column densities ≳10²¹ atom cm^–2. The optical spectra of the CCGs in these clusters exhibit substantial intrinsic reddening, at levels consistent with the X-ray absorption results if standard dust-to-gas ratios are assumed.