# Molecular Clouds in Cooling Flow Clusters of Galaxies

## 1. Introduction

Cooling flows in clusters of galaxies deposit large quantities of cool gas around the central galaxy, which is still growing. The final evolution of the cool gas is not clear. It may just accumulate as cool dense clouds. The metallicity of a cluster seems to be correlated with the presence of a cooling flow. In this context molecules such as $`CO`$ can subsequently be formed in the gaseous medium. O’Dea, Baum, Maloney et al. (1994) searched for molecular gas, by looking for $`CO`$ emission lines in a heterogeneous sample of cooling flow clusters. They come to the conclusion that in order to have escaped detection the gas has to be very cold, close to the temperature of the Cosmic Background Radiation.   
The aim of this contribution is to discuss the minimum temperature achievable by sub-clouds (resulting from the fragmentation of bigger clouds) in cooling flow regions by improving the analysis done by O’Dea, Baum, Maloney et al. (1994), in particular by considering clouds made of $`H_2`$, $`HD`$ and $`CO`$ molecules and by computing cooling functions which are more appropriate for temperatures below 20 K.

## 2. Thermal equilibrium

In the standard Big Bang model primordial chemistry took place around the epoch of recombination. At this stage the chemical species were essentially hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium. Then with the adiabatic cooling of the Universe due to the expansion, different routes led to molecular formation (Puy et al. 1993). Molecules play an important role in the cooling of the denser clouds via the excitation of rotational levels.   
In order to calculate analytically the molecular cooling, Puy, Grenacher and Jetzer (1999) consider only the transition between the ground state and the first rotational level for $`H_2`$, $`HD`$ and $`CO`$. As expected, it turns out that $`CO`$ is the main coolant at low temperatures below 20 K.   
The clouds are embedded in the hot intracluster gas, whose emission is dominated by thermal bremsstrahlung. We introduce an attenuating factor $`\tau `$ characterizing the column density surrounding the sub-clouds. The attenuated bremsstrahlung flux coming from the intracluster gas heats the clouds located in the cooling flow at a distance $`r`$ from the cluster center.   
Thermal balance between heating and cooling defines an equilibrium temperature of the sub-clouds at a distance $`r`$ inside the cooling region: $`r<r_{cool}`$ (where $`r_{cool}`$ is the cooling radius).   
As an example we choose PKS 0745-191 which is embedded in one of the largest known cooling flows. We adopt the following column densities for a typical small cloud: $`N_{CO}=10^{14}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup>, $`N_{H_2}=2\times 10^{18}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup> with $`n_{H_2}=10^6`$ cm<sup>-3</sup> (density of $`H_2`$). These values correspond to a size for the cloud of $`L10^6`$ pc, moreover we take the following abundance $`\eta _{HD}=N_{HD}/N_{H_2}=7\times 10^5`$.   
The first column of the following table gives the minimum temperature of the sub-clouds, $`T_{clump}`$, inside the cooling flow region for different values of $`\tau `$ with $`\eta _{CO}=5\times 10^5`$, whereas the second column gives $`T_{clump}`$ for different values of $`\eta _{CO}`$ with $`\tau =2.5`$.

The hypothesis of very cold molecular gas in cooling flows seems reasonable given also the fact that with our approximations we get upper limits for the cloud temperatures.

### Acknowledgments.

We are grateful to Monique Signore for valuable discussions. This work has been supported by the D<sup>r</sup> Tomalla Foundation and by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

## References

O’Dea C., Baum S., Maloney P. et al. 1994 ApJ422, 467

Puy D., Alecian G., Lebourlot J. et al. 1993 A&A267, 337

Puy D., Grenacher L., Jetzer Ph. 1999 A&A345, 723