Cool Embeddings: Predicting Galaxy Cluster Cooling Times in IllustrisTNG and TNG-Cluster with AstroCLIP
Foundation models trained on optical astronomical data have not previously been applied to X-ray cluster thermodynamics. We show that embeddings from AstroCLIP, a contrastive vision-language model trained on optical galaxy images and spectra, retain physically meaningful structure when applied to mock Chandra X-ray ima...