Stability of cold fronts in clusters: is magnetic field necessary?

Abstract

Cold fronts - sharp discontinuities recently discovered by Chandra in many clusters of galaxies - are believed to be due to a hot gas flow over a colder gravitationally bound gas cloud. We analyze the stability of the fronts with respect to Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and show that an intrinsic width of the interface of the order of a few per cent of the curvature radius strongly limits the growth of perturbation. For the best studied case of a front in the Cluster Abell 3667 we conclude that current observational data on the width and extent of the front can be explained even in the absence of dynamically important magnetic fields.