It's Cloud's Illusions I Recall: Mixing Drives the Acceleration of
  Clouds from Ram Pressure Stripped Galaxies
  Ram Pressure Stripping can remove gas from satellite galaxies in clusters via
a direct interaction between the intracluster medium (ICM) and the interstellar
medium. This interaction is generally thought of as a contact force per area,
however we point out that these gases must interact in a hydrodynamic fashion,
and argue that this will lead to mixing of the galactic gas with the ICM wind.
We develop an analytic framework for how mixing is related to the acceleration
of stripped gas from a satellite galaxy. We then test this model using three
"wind-tunnel" simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies interacting with a moving
ICM, and find excellent agreement with predictions using the analytic
framework. Focusing on the dense clumps in the stripped tails, we find that
they are nearly uniformly mixed with the ICM, indicating that all gas in the
tail mixes with the surroundings, and dense clumps are not separate entities to
be modeled differently than diffuse gas. We find that while mixing drives
acceleration of stripped gas, the density and velocity of the surrounding wind
will determine whether the mixing results in the heating of stripped gas into
the ICM, or the cooling of the ICM into dense clouds.
