Decoupled and inhomogeneous gas flows in S0 galaxies

A recent analysis of the Einstein sample of early-type galaxies has revealed that at any fixed optical luminosity L(B), SO galaxies have lower mean X-ray luminosity L(X) per unit L(B) than elliptical galaxies. Following a previous analytical investigation of this problem (Ciotti & Pellegrini), we have performed two-dimensional numerical simulations of the gas hows inside SO galaxies in order to ascertain the effectiveness of rotation and/or galaxy flattening in reducing the L(X)/L(B) ratio. The flow in models without supernova (SNIa) heating is considerably ordered, and essentially all the gas lost by the stars is cooled and accumulated in the galaxy center. If rotation is present, the cold material settles in a disk on the galactic equatorial plane. Models with a time-decreasing SNIa heating host gas hows that can be much more complex. After an initial wind phase, gas flows in energetically strongly bound galaxies tend to reverse to inflows. This occurs in the polar regions, while the disk is still in the outflow phase. In this phase of strong decoupling, cold filaments are created at the interface between inflowing and outflowing gas. Models with more realistic values of the dynamical quantities are preferentially found in the wind phase with respect to their spherical counterparts of equal L(B). The resulting L(X) of this class of models is lower than in spherical models with the same L(B) and SNIa heating. At variance with cooling flow models, rotation is shown to have only a marginal effect in this reduction, while the flattening is one of the driving parameters for such underluminosity, in accordance with the analytical investigation.