Coffee talks
Friday 06/03/2026 @ 11:30, Sala riunioni quarto piano e on-line (meet.google.com/sue-bwvk-axf)
Lawrence Rudnick (University of Minnesota, U.S.A.), "The Secret Intracluster Medium: radio tracers"
In clusters of galaxies, the dominant baryonic mass is the hot intracluster medium — and it is a mess (in a good way)! The ICM records the history of cluster assembly, and regulates the continuing evolution of its galaxies. But studying the actual dynamics of this hot gas has been a slow and challenging process. Over the decades, radio galaxies have served as weathervanes in the ICM. Today, with increasingly detailed maps from LOFAR, ASKAP and MeerKAT, the richness of dynamical structures in the ICM is being revealed — and it’s another mess! There are likely shear and other turbulent motions where they were not expected, and channels of magnetic field reaching pressures comparable to the thermal gas itself. In this talk, we’ll take a brief look at some of the history of the radio galaxy/ICM interactions, a little bit of fun 3D reconstructions using Faraday rotation, and preview where things could go in the era of the SKA precursors and XRISM.