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Register a new userHard X-Ray Radiation in the Coma Cluster Spectrum
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Fusco-Femiano Roberto
Publication date
1999
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
R. Fusco-Femiano
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Hard X-ray radiation has been detected for the first time in the Coma cluster by BeppoSAX. Thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity of the Phoswich Detection System (PDS) instrument, the source has been detected up to ~80 keV. There is clear evidence (4.5 sigma) for non-thermal emission in excess of thermal above ~25 keV. The hard excess is very unlikely due to X Comae, the Seyfert 1 galaxy present in the field of view of the PDS. A hard spectral tail due to inverse Compton on CMB photons is predicted in clusters, like Coma, with radio halos. Combining the present results with radio observations, a volume-averaged intracluster magnetic field of ~0.15 micro G is derived, while the electron energy density of the emitting electrons is ~7x10**-14 erg/cm**3.
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The brightest cluster radio halo known resides in the Coma cluster of galaxies. The relativistic electrons producing this diffuse synchrotron emission should also produce inverse Compton emission that becomes competitive with thermal emission from the ICM at hard X-ray energies. Thus far, claimed detections of this emission in Coma are controversial (Fusco-Femiano et al. 2004; Rossetti & Molendi 2004). We present a Suzaku HXD-PIN observation of the Coma cluster in order to nail down its non-thermal hard X-ray content. The contribution of thermal emission to the HXD-PIN spectrum is constrained by simultaneously fitting thermal and non-thermal models to it and a spatially equivalent spectrum derived from an XMM-Newton mosaic of the Coma field (Schuecker et al. 2004). We fail to find statistically significant evidence for non-thermal emission in the spectra, which are better described by only a single or multi-temperature model for the ICM. Including systematic uncertainties, we derive a 90% upper limit on the flux of non-thermal emission of 6.0x10^-12 erg/s/cm^2 (20-80 keV, for photon index of 2.0), which implies a lower limit on the cluster-averaged magnetic field of B>0.15 microG. Our flux upper limit is 2.5x lower than the detected non-thermal flux from RXTE (Rephaeli & Gruber 2002) and BeppoSAX (Fusco-Femiano et al. 2004). However, if the non-thermal hard X-ray emission in Coma is more spatially extended than the observed radio halo, the Suzaku HXD-PIN may miss some fraction of the emission. A detailed investigation indicates that ~50-67% of the emission might go undetected, which could make our limit consistent with these detections. The thermal interpretation of the hard Coma spectrum is consistent with recent analyses of INTEGRAL (Eckert et al. 2007) and Swift (Ajello et al. 2009) data.
The Coma cluster of galaxies hosts the brightest radio halo known and has therefore been the target of numerous searches for associated inverse Compton (IC) emission, particularly at hard X-ray energies where the IC signal must eventually dominate over thermal emission. The most recent search with the Suzaku Hard X-ray Detector (HXD) failed to confirm previous IC detections with RXTE and BeppoSAX, instead setting an upper limit 2.5 times below their nonthermal flux. However, this discrepancy can be resolved if the IC emission is very extended, beyond the scale of the cluster radio halo. Using reconstructed sky images from the 58-month Swift BAT all sky survey, the feasibility of such a solution is investigated. Building on Renaud et al., we test and implement a method for extracting the fluxes of extended sources, assuming specified spatial distributions. BAT spectra are jointly fit with an XMM-Newton EPIC-pn spectrum derived from mosaic observations. We find no evidence for large-scale IC emission at the level expected from the previously detected nonthermal fluxes. For all nonthermal spatial distributions considered, which span the gamut of physically reasonable IC models, we determine upper limits for which the largest (most conservative) limit is <4.2x10^{-12} erg/s/cm^2 (20-80 keV), which corresponds to a lower limit on the magnetic field B>0.2uG. A nominal flux upper limit of <2.7x10^{-12} erg/s/cm^2, with corresponding B>0.25uG, is derived for the most probable IC distribution given the size of the radio halo and likely magnetic field radial profile.
The XMM-Newton survey of the Coma cluster of galaxies covers an area of 1.86 square degrees with a mosaic of 16 pointings and has a total useful integration time of 400 ksec. Detected X-ray sources with extent less than 10 were correlated with cataloged galaxies in the Coma cluster region. The redshift information, which is abundant in this region of the sky, allowed us to separate cluster members from background and foreground galaxies. For the background sources, we recover a typical LogN-LogS in the flux range 1.e-15 - 1.e-13 ergs/s/cm^2 in the 0.5-2.0 keV band. The X-ray emission from the cluster galaxies exhibits X-ray colors typical of thermal emission. The luminosities of Coma galaxies lie in the 1.e39-1.e41 ergs/s interval in the 0.5-2.0 keV band. The luminosity function of Coma galaxies reveals that their X-ray activity is suppressed with respect to the field by a factor of 5.6, indicating a lower level of X-ray emission for a given stellar mass.
X-ray surface brightness fluctuations in the core ($650 times 650$ kpc) region of the Coma cluster observed with XMM-Newton and Chandra are analyzed using a 2D power spectrum approach. The resulting 2D spectra are converted to 3D power spectra of gas density fluctuations. Our independent analyses of the XMM-Newton and Chandra observations are in excellent agreement and provide the most sensitive measurements of surface brightness and density fluctuations for a hot cluster. We find that the characteristic amplitude of the volume filling density fluctuations relative to the smooth underlying density distribution varies from 7-10% on scales of $sim$500 kpc down to $sim$5% at scales $sim$ 30 kpc. On smaller spatial scales, projection effects smear the density fluctuations by a large factor, precluding strong limits on the fluctuations in 3D. On the largest scales probed (hundreds of kpc), the dominant contributions to the observed fluctuations most likely arise from perturbations of the gravitational potential by the two most massive galaxies in Coma, NGC4874 and NGC4889, and the low entropy gas brought to the cluster by an infalling group. Other plausible sources of X-ray surface brightness fluctuations are discussed, including turbulence, metal abundance variations, and unresolved sources. Despite a variety of possible origins for density fluctuations, the gas in the Coma cluster core is remarkably homogeneous on scales from $sim$ 500 to $sim$30 kpc.
After the positive detection by BeppoSAX of hard X-ray radiation up to ~80 keV in the Coma cluster spectrum, we present evidence for nonthermal emission from A2256 in excess of thermal emission at a 4.6sigma confidence level. In addition to this power law component, a second nonthermal component already detected by ASCA could be present in the X-ray spectrum of the cluster, not surprisingly given the complex radio morphology of the cluster central region. The spectral index of the hard tail detected by the PDS onboard BeppoSAX is marginally consistent with that expected by the inverse Compton model. A value of ~0.05 microG is derived for the intracluster magnetic field of the extended radio emission in the northern regions of the cluster, while a higher value of ~0.5 microG could be present in the central radio halo, likely related to the hard tail detected by ASCA.
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