  We report on a 120 ks XMM-Newton observation of the galaxy cluster Abell
2597. Results from both the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) and the
Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS) are presented. From EPIC we obtain radial
profiles of temperature, density and abundance, and use these to derive cooling
time and entropy. We illustrate corrections to these profiles for projection
and point spread function (PSF) effects. At the spatial resolution available to
XMM-Newton, the temperature declines by around a factor of two in the central
150 kpc or so in radius, and the abundance increases from about one-fifth to
over one-half solar. The cooling time is less than 10 Gyr inside a radius of
130 kpc. EPIC fits to the central region are consistent with a cooling flow of
around 100 solar masses per year. Broad-band fits to the RGS spectra extracted
from the central 2 arcmin are also consistent with a cooling flow of the same
magnitude; with a preferred low-temperature cut-off of essentially zero. The
data appear to suggest (albeit at low significance levels below formal
detection limits) the presence of the important thermometer lines from Fe XVII
at 15, 17 Angstrom rest wavelength, characteristic of gas at temperatures ~ 0.3
keV. The measured flux in each line is converted to a mass deposition estimate
by comparison with a classical cooling flow model, and once again values at the
level of 100 solar masses per year are obtained. These mass deposition rates,
whilst lower than those of previous generations of X-ray observatories, are
consistent with those obtained from UV data for this object. This raises the
possibility of a classical cooling flow, at the level of around 100 solar
masses per year, cooling from 4 keV by more than two orders of magnitude in
temperature.

Astrophysics