The survival of gas clouds in the Circumgalactic Medium of Milky
  Way-like galaxies
  Observational evidence shows that low-redshift galaxies are surrounded by
extended haloes of multiphase gas, the so-called 'circumgalactic medium' (CGM).
To study the survival of relatively cool gas (T < 10^5 K) in the CGM, we
performed a set of hydrodynamical simulations of cold (T = 10^4 K) neutral gas
clouds travelling through a hot (T = 2x10^6 K) and low-density (n = 10^-4
cm^-3) coronal medium, typical of Milky Way-like galaxies at large
galactocentric distances (~ 50-150 kpc). We explored the effects of different
initial values of relative velocity and radius of the clouds. Our simulations
were performed on a two-dimensional grid with constant mesh size (2 pc) and
they include radiative cooling, photoionization heating and thermal conduction.
We found that for large clouds (radii larger than 250 pc) the cool gas survives
for very long time (larger than 250 Myr): despite that they are partially
destroyed and fragmented into smaller cloudlets during their trajectory, the
total mass of cool gas decreases at very low rates. We found that thermal
conduction plays a significant role: its effect is to hinder formation of
hydrodynamical instabilities at the cloud-corona interface, keeping the cloud
compact and therefore more difficult to destroy. The distribution of column
densities extracted from our simulations are compatible with those observed for
low-temperature ions (e.g. SiII and SiIII) and for high-temperature ions (OVI)
once we take into account that OVI covers much more extended regions than the
cool gas and, therefore, it is more likely to be detected along a generic line
of sight.
