Mass deposition in cooling flows - analysis of the X-ray data

A 'multiphase method' is presented for the analysis of X-ray data of the cooling inflow region of intracluster gas in clusters of galaxies. The method employs a range of densities at each radius and treats the mass-deposition from the flow in a self-consistent way. Good agreement is found between results from this multiphase method and those obtained with a previous, single-phase approach which assumed only one characteristic density at each radius. For the best data-sets the density distribution of the various phases agrees with theoretical expectations only if a massive halo is added to the gravitational potential of the central galaxy. Mass deposition profiles, of those clusters for which the method is applicable are presented. (author)