Speaker
Description
For years we have grappled with the “cooling flow problem” in galaxy clusters, where the massive reserves of hot ($10^7$ K) gas in the intracluster medium (ICM) have been universally observed to form stars with an efficiency of only 1-10%. Feedback from accreting active galactic nuclei (AGN) has been identified as the likely heating source capable of suppressing runaway cooling by up to two orders of magnitude. However, many details about how this balance between cooling and feedback is established, and for how long it’s been operating in clusters, are still unresolved. Recent Sunyaev Zeldovich (SZ) effect-based surveys at mm wavelengths have been discovering galaxy clusters out to high redshifts at a prodigious rate, opening a new window allowing us to answer questions about how clusters and the multiphase gas, stars, and galaxies within them evolve over cosmic time. In this talk, we will present new results based on our large (~100) sample of SZ-selected galaxy clusters discovered by the South Pole Telescope, spanning a redshift range ($0.3
