Cooling flows in clusters of galaxies

X-ray measurements of many clusters of galaxies reveal a hot Intracluster Medium (ICM) that has a cooling time less than a Hubble time. The consequent decrease in the central pressure support of the ICM will result in an inward cooling flow. The inferred accretion rates are typically several hundred solar masses per year. The cD or giant elliptical found at the center of every cooling flow would be substantially altered by the accreted gas, and may even have been created by the flow. Optical, UV, and radio measurements, however, fail to find adequate evidence for massive amounts of cool gas. The lore is that the gas is transformed into stars of such low mass that they do not give very peculiar colors to the central galaxy. In this thesis, after a review of past and current literature, two tasks are undertaken. The first is to examine the role heat conduction could play. It is demonstrated that the density and temperature profiles of the cooling flows in Virgo and Perseus are consistent with a steady-state model in which that conduction reduces the accretion rates by an order of magnitude. The second task is to simulate the evolution of a cooling flow, and possible formation of a galaxy from thermal instabilities, in a proper cosmological setting. Two evolutionary stages are found, a dynamical accretion state composed of two competing similarity solutions followed by a quasi-steady-state cooling flow. The onset of the second stage is very recent. During either stage, so few stars may be created that their colors, even adopting a standard initial mass function, would be consistent with the existing optical and UV constraints