Oxygen Absorption in Cooling Flows

The inhomogeneous cooling flow scenario predicts the existence of large quantities of gas in massive elliptical galaxies, groups, and clusters that have cooled and dropped out of the flow. Using spatially resolved, deprojected X-ray spectra from the ROSAT PSPC, we have detected strong absorption over energies approximately 0.4-0.8 keV intrinsic to the central approximately 1&arcmin; of the galaxy NGC 1399, the group NGC 5044, and the cluster A1795. These systems have among the largest nearby cooling flows in their respective classes and low Galactic columns. Since no excess absorption is indicated for energies below approximately 0.4 keV, the most reasonable model for the absorber is warm, collisionally ionized gas with T=105-106 K in which ionized states of oxygen provide most of the absorption. Attributing the absorption only to ionized gas reconciles the large columns of cold H and He inferred from Einstein and ASCA with the lack of such columns inferred from ROSAT and also is consistent with the negligible atomic and molecular H inferred from H i and CO observations of cooling flows. The prediction of warm ionized gas as the product of mass dropout in these and other cooling flows can be verified by Chandra and X-Ray Multimirror Mission.