Starburst-driven galactic winds -- I. Energetics and intrinsic X-ray emission

Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Starburst-driven galactic winds are responsible for the transport of mass, in particular metal enriched gas, and energy out of galaxies and into the inter-galactic medium. These outflows directly affect the chemical evolution of galaxies, and heat and enrich the inter-galactic and inter-cluster medium. Currently several basic problems preclude quantitative measurements of the impact of galactic winds: the unknown filling factors of, in particular, the soft X-ray emitting gas prevents accurate measurements of densities, masses and energy content; multiphase temperature distributions of unknown complexity bias X-ray determined abundances; unknown amounts of energy and mass may reside in hard to observe T ∼ 10 5 K and T ∼ 10 7.5 K phases; and the relative balance of thermal vs. kinetic energy in galactic winds is not known. In an effort to address these problems we have performed an extensive hydrodynamical parameter study of starburst-driven galactic winds, motivated by the latest