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We estimate the thermal conductivity of a weakly collisional magnetized plasma with chaotic magnetic field fluctuations. When the fluctuation spectrum extends over two or more decades in wavevector, we find that thermal conduction is very efficient; the conduction coefficient is only a factor of ~5 below the classical Spitzer estimate. We suggest that conduction could play a significant role in cooling flows in clusters of galaxies.
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Narayan et al. (2001) studied this question.
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