Better together: the complex interplay between radiative cooling and magnetic draping

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rapidly outflowing cold H i gas is ubiquitously observed to be cospatial with a hot phase in galactic winds, yet the ablation time of cold gas by the hot phase should be much shorter than the acceleration time. Previous work showed efficient radiative cooling enables clouds to survive in hot galactic winds under certain conditions, as can magnetic fields even in purely adiabatic simulations for sufficiently small density contrasts between the wind and cloud. In this work, we study the interplay between radiative cooling and magnetic draping via three dimensional radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulations with perpendicular ambient fields and tangled internal cloud fields. We find magnetic fields decrease the critical cloud radius for survival by two orders of magnitude (i.e. to sub-pc scales) in the strongly magnetized (βwind = 1) case. Our results show magnetic fields (i) accelerate cloud entrainment through magnetic draping, (ii) can cause faster cloud destruction in cases of inefficient radiative cooling, (iii) do not significantly suppress mass growth for efficiently cooling clouds, and, crucially, in combination with radiative cooling (iv) reduce the average overdensity by providing non-thermal pressure support of the cold gas. This substantially reduces the acceleration time compared to the destruction time (more than due to draping alone), enhancing cloud survival. Our results may help to explain the cold tiny rapidly outflowing cold gas observed in galactic winds and the subsequent high covering fraction of cold material in galactic haloes.