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Register a new userLine-of-sight gas sloshing in the cool core of Abell 907
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We present line-of-sight gas sloshing first found in a cool core in a galaxy cluster. The galaxy cluster Abell 907 is identified as a relaxed cluster owing to its global X-ray surface brightness taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray residual image after removing the global emission of the intracluster medium (ICM), however, shows an arc-like positive excess and a negative excess surrounding the central positive excess in the cluster core, which in turn indicates a disturbance of the ICM. We analyze the X-ray spectra extracted from both regions and find that (1) the ICM temperature and the metal abundance in the positive excess are lower and higher than those in the negative excess, respectively, and (2) the ICM is nearly in pressure equilibrium. We also find a slight redshift difference between the positive and the negative excesses, which corresponds to the velocity shear of $1680^{+1300}_{-920}$ km s$^{-1}$ ($1sigma$). The X-ray residual image and the ICM properties are consistent with those expected by line-of-sight gas sloshing. Assuming that the gas is moving toward inverse-parallel to each other along the line-of-sight, the shear velocity is expected to be $sim 800$ km s$^{-1}$. The velocity field of this level is able to provide non-thermal pressure support by $sim 34%$ relative to the thermal one. The total kinetic energy inferred from the shear velocity corresponds to $sim 30%$ of the bolometric luminosity of the sloshing ICM. Abell 907 is therefore complementary to galaxy clusters in which gas sloshing takes place in the plane of the sky, and is important for understanding gas dynamics driven by sloshing and its influence on the heating to prevent runaway cooling.
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We present an analysis of a 72 ks Chandra observation of the double cluster Abell 1644 (z=0.047). The X-ray temperatures indicate the masses are M500=2.6+/-0.4 x10^{14} h^{-1} M_sun for the northern subcluster and M500=3.1+/-0.4 x10^{14} h^{-1} M_sun for the southern, main cluster. We identify a sharp edge in the radial X-ray surface brightness of the main cluster, which we find to be a cold front, with a jump in temperature of a factor of ~3. This edge possesses a spiral morphology characteristic of core gas sloshing around the cluster potential minimum. We present observational evidence, supported by hydrodynamic simulations, that the northern subcluster is the object which initiated the core gas sloshing in the main cluster at least 700 Myr ago. We discuss reheating of the main clusters core gas via two mechanisms brought about by the sloshing gas: first, the release of gravitational potential energy gained by the cores displacement from the potential minimum, and second, a dredging inwards of the outer, higher entropy cluster gas along finger-shaped streams. We find the available gravitational potential energy is small compared to the energy released by the cooling gas in the core.
RXJ1347.5-1145 (z = 0.451) is one of the most luminous X-ray galaxy clusters, which hosts a prominent cool core and exhibits a signature of a major merger. We present the first direct observational evidence for sub-sonic nature of sloshing motion of the cool core. We find that a residual X-ray image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory after removing the global emission shows a clear dipolar pattern characteristic of gas sloshing, whereas we find no significant residual in the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE) image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). We estimate the equation of state of perturbations in the gas from the X-ray and SZE residual images. The inferred velocity is 420 +310 -420 km s-1, which is much lower than the adiabatic sound speed of the intracluster medium in the core. We thus conclude that the perturbation is nearly isobaric, and gas sloshing motion is consistent with being in pressure equilibrium. Next, we report evidence for gas stripping of an infalling subcluster, which likely shock-heats gas to high temperature well in excess of 20 keV. Using mass distribution inferred from strong lensing images of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we find that the mass peak is located away from the peak position of stripped gas with statistical significance of > 5{sigma}. Unlike for the gas sloshing, the velocity inferred from the equation of state of the excess hot gas is comparable to the adiabatic sound speed expected for the 20 keV intracluster medium. All of the results support that the southeast substructure is created by a merger. On the other hand, the positional offset between the mass and the gas limits the self-interaction cross section of dark matter to be less than 3.7 h-1 cm2 g-1 (95% CL).
The rich galaxy cluster Abell 2204 exhibits edges in its X-ray surface brightness at $sim 65$ and $35 {rm~ kpc}$ west and east of its center, respectively. The presence of these edges, which were interpreted as sloshing cold fronts, implies that the intracluster medium was recently disturbed. We analyze the properties of the intracluster medium using multiple Chandra observations of Abell 2204. We find a density ratio $n_{rm in}/n_{rm out} = 2.05pm0.05$ and a temperature ratio $T_{rm out}/T_{rm in} = 1.91pm0.27$ (projected, or $1.87pm0.56$ deprojected) across the western edge, and correspondingly $n_{rm in}/n_{rm out} = 1.96pm0.05$ and $T_{rm out}/T_{rm in} =1.45pm0.15$ (projected, or $1.25pm0.26$ deprojected) across the eastern edge. These values are typical of cold fronts in galaxy clusters. This, together with the spiral pattern observed in the cluster core, supports the sloshing scenario for Abell 2204. No Kelvin-Helmholtz eddies are observed along the cold front surfaces, indicating that they are effectively suppressed by some physical mechanism. We argue that the suppression is likely facilitated by the magnetic fields amplified in the sloshing motion, and deduce from the measured gas properties that the magnetic field strength should be greater than $24pm6$ $mu$G and $32pm8$ $mu$G along the west and east cold fronts, respectively.
X-ray observations of many clusters of galaxies reveal the presence of edges in surface brightness and temperature, known as cold fronts. In relaxed clusters with cool cores, these edges have been interpreted as evidence for the sloshing of the core gas in the clusters gravitational potential. The smoothness of these edges has been interpreted as evidence for the stabilizing effect of magnetic fields draped around the front surfaces. To check this hypothesis, we perform high-resolution magnetohydrodynamics simulations of magnetized gas sloshing in galaxy clusters initiated by encounters with subclusters. We go beyond previous works on the simulation of cold fronts in a magnetized intracluster medium by simulating their formation in realistic, idealized mergers with high resolution ({Delta}x ~ 2 kpc). Our simulations sample a parameter space of plausible initial magnetic field strengths and field configurations. In the simulations, we observe strong velocity shears associated with the cold fronts amplifying the magnetic field along the cold front surfaces, increasing the magnetic field strength in these layers by up to an order of magnitude, and boosting the magnetic pressure up to near-equipartition with thermal pressure in some cases. In these layers, the magnetic field becomes strong enough to stabilize the cold fronts against Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, resulting in sharp, smooth fronts as those seen in observations of real clusters. These magnetic fields also result in strong suppression of mixing of high and low-entropy gas in the cluster, seen in our simulations of mergers in the absence of a magnetic field. As a result, the heating of the core due to sloshing is very modest and is unable to stave off a cooling catastrophe.
Abell~1142 is a low-mass galaxy cluster at low redshift containing two comparable Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCG) resembling a scaled-down version of the Coma Cluster. Our Chandra analysis reveals an X-ray emission peak, roughly 100 kpc away from either BCG, which we identify as the cluster center. The emission center manifests itself as a second beta-model surface brightness component distinct from that of the cluster on larger scales. The center is also substantially cooler and more metal rich than the surrounding intracluster medium (ICM), which makes Abell 1142 appear to be a cool core cluster. The redshift distribution of its member galaxies indicates that Abell 1142 may contain two subclusters with each containing one BCG. The BCGs are merging at a relative velocity of ~1200 km/s. This ongoing merger may have shock-heated the ICM from ~ 2 keV to above 3 keV, which would explain the anomalous L_X--T_X scaling relation for this system. This merger may have displaced the metal-enriched cool core of either of the subclusters from the BCG. The southern BCG consists of three individual galaxies residing within a radius of 5 kpc in projection. These galaxies should rapidly sink into the subcluster center due to the dynamical friction of a cuspy cold dark matter halo.
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