46 research outputs found
Cold fronts in galaxy clusters
Cold fronts have been observed in a large number of galaxy clusters.
Understanding their nature and origin is of primary importance for the
investigation of the internal dynamics of clusters. To gain insight on the
nature of these features, we carry out a statistical investigation of their
occurrence in a sample of galaxy clusters observed with XMM-Newton and we
correlate their presence with different cluster properties. We have selected a
sample of 45 clusters starting from the B55 flux limited sample by Edge et al.
(1990) and performed a systematic search of cold fronts. We find that a large
fraction of clusters host at least one cold front. Cold fronts are easily
detected in all systems that are manifestly undergoing a merger event in the
plane of the sky while the presence of such features in the remaining clusters
is related to the presence of a steep entropy gradient, in agreement with
theoretical expectations. Assuming that cold fronts in cool core clusters are
triggered by minor merger events, we estimate a minimum of 1/3 merging events
per halo per Gyr.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Version with
full resolution figures available at:
http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~simona/pub/coldfronts/ghizzardi.pd
Metal distribution in sloshing galaxy clusters: the case of A496
We report results from a detailed study of the sloshing gas in the core of
A496. We detect the low temperature/entropy spiral feature found in several
cores, we also find that conduction between the gas in the spiral and the
ambient medium must be suppressed by more than one order of magnitude with
respect to Spitzer conductivity. Intriguingly, while the gas in the spiral
features a higher metal abundance than the surrounding medium, it follows the
entropy vs metal abundance relation defined by gas lying outside the spiral.
The most plausible explanation for this behavior is that the low entropy metal
rich plasma uplifted through the cluster atmosphere by sloshing, suffers little
heating or mixing with the ambient medium. While sloshing appears to be capable
of uplifting significant amounts of gas, the limited heat exchange and mixing
between gas in and outside the spiral implies that this mechanism is not at all
effective in: 1) permanently redistributing metals within the core region and
2) heating up the coolest and densest gas, thereby providing little or no
contribution to staving of catastrophic cooling in cool cores.Comment: Accepted for publication on A&
SMAUG: a new technique for the deprojection of galaxy clusters
This paper presents a new technique for reconstructing the spatial
distributions of hydrogen, temperature and metal abundance of a galaxy cluster.
These quantities are worked out from the X-ray spectrum, modeled starting from
few analytical functions describing their spatial distributions. These
functions depend upon some parameters, determined by fitting the model to the
observed spectrum. We have implemented this technique as a new model in the
XSPEC software analysis package. We describe the details of the method, and
apply it to work out the structure of the cluster A1795. We combine the
observation of three satellites, exploiting the high spatial resolution of
Chandra for the cluster core, the wide collecting area of XMM-Newton for the
intermediate regions and the large field of view of Beppo-SAX for the outer
regions. We also test the validity and precision of our method by i) comparing
its results with those from a geometrical deprojection, ii) examining the
spectral residuals at different radii of the cluster and iii) reprojecting the
unfolded profiles and comparing them directly to the measured quantities. Our
analytical method yields the parameters defining the spatial functions directly
from the spectra. Their explicit knowledge allows a straightforward derivation
of other indirect physical quantities like the gravitating mass, as well as a
fast and easy estimate of the profiles uncertainties.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables; emulateapj; accepted for publication
in the Astrophysical Journa
A Systematic Analysis of the XMM-Newton Background: I. Dataset and Extraction Procedures
XMM-Newton is the direct precursor of the future ESA ATHENA mission. A study
of its particle-induced background provides therefore significant insight for
the ATHENA mission design. We make use of about 12 years of data, products from
the third XMM-Newton catalog as well as FP7 EXTraS project to avoid celestial
sources contamination and to disentangle the different components of the
XMM-Newton particle-induced background. Within the ESA R&D AREMBES
collaboration, we built new analysis pipelines to study the different
components of this background: this covers time behavior as well as spectral
and spatial characteristics.Comment: To appear in Experimental Astronomy, presented at AHEAD Background
Workshop, 28-30 November 2016, Rome, Italy. 12 pages, 6 figure
A systematic analysis of the XMM-Newton background: III. Impact of the magnetospheric environment
A detailed characterization of the particle induced background is fundamental
for many of the scientific objectives of the Athena X-ray telescope, thus an
adequate knowledge of the background that will be encountered by Athena is
desirable. Current X-ray telescopes have shown that the intensity of the
particle induced background can be highly variable. Different regions of the
magnetosphere can have very different environmental conditions, which can, in
principle, differently affect the particle induced background detected by the
instruments. We present results concerning the influence of the magnetospheric
environment on the background detected by EPIC instrument onboard XMM-Newton
through the estimate of the variation of the in-Field-of-View background excess
along the XMM-Newton orbit. An important contribution to the XMM background,
which may affect the Athena background as well, comes from soft proton flares.
Along with the flaring component a low-intensity component is also present. We
find that both show modest variations in the different magnetozones and that
the soft proton component shows a strong trend with the distance from Earth.Comment: To appear in Experimental Astronomy. Presented at AHEAD Background
Workshop, 28-30 November 2016. Rome, Ital
An XMM-Newton proton response matrix
Soft protons constitute an important source of background in focusing X-ray telescopes, as Chandra and XMM-Newton experience has shown. The optics in fact transmit them to the focal plane with efficiency similar to the X-ray photon one. This effect is a good opportunity to study the environment of the Earth magnetosphere crossed by the X-ray satellite orbits, provided that we can link the spectra detected by the instruments with the ones impacting on the optics. For X-ray photons this link has the form of the so-called response matrix that includes the optics effective area and the energy redistribution in the detectors. Here we present a first attempt to produce a proton response matrix exploiting ray-tracing and GEANT4 simulations with the final aim to be able to analyse XMM-Newton soft proton data and link them to the external environment. If the procedure is found to be reliable, it can be applied to any future X-ray missions to predict the soft particles spectra impacting on the focal plane instruments
Radiative cooling, heating and thermal conduction in M87
The crisis of the standard cooling flow model brought about by Chandra and
XMM-Newton observations of galaxy clusters, has led to the development of
several models which explore different heating processes in order to assess if
they can quench the cooling flow. Among the most appealing mechanisms are
thermal conduction and heating through buoyant gas deposited in the ICM by
AGNs. We combine Virgo/M87 observations of three satellites (Chandra,
XMM-Newton and Beppo-SAX) to inspect the dynamics of the ICM in the center of
the cluster. Using the spectral deprojection technique, we derive the physical
quantities describing the ICM and determine the extra-heating needed to balance
the cooling flow assuming that thermal conduction operates at a fixed fraction
of the Spitzer value. We assume that the extra-heating is due to buoyant gas
and we fit the data using the model developed by Ruszkowski and Begelman
(2002). We derive a scale radius for the model of kpc, which is
comparable with the M87 AGN jet extension, and a required luminosity of the AGN
of a erg s, which is comparable to the observed AGN
luminosity. We discuss a scenario where the buoyant bubbles are filled of
relativistic particles and magnetic field responsible for the radio emission in
M87. The AGN is supposed to be intermittent and to inject populations of
buoyant bubbles through a succession of outbursts. We also study the X-ray cool
component detected in the radio lobes and suggest that it is structured in
blobs which are tied to the radio buoyant bubbles.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures and 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap
A systematic analysis of the XMM-Newton background: IV. Origin of the unfocused and focused components
We show the results obtained in the FP7 European program EXTraS and in the ESA R&D ATHENA activity AREMBES aimed at a deeper understanding of the XMM-Newton background to better design the ATHENA mission. Thanks to an analysis of the full EPIC archive coupled to the information obtained by the Radiation Monitor we show the cosmic ray origin of the unfocused particle background and its anti-correlation with the solar activity. We show the first results of the effort to obtain informations about the particle component of the soft proton focused background
VizieR Online Data Catalog: X-ray_peak-BCG offset for PSZ1 clusters (Rossetti+, 2016)
The starting point of our analysis is the Planck cosmology sample (PSZ1-cosmo) described in Planck Collaboration XX (2014A&A...571A..20P). It is a high-purity subsample constructed from the first release of the Planck catalogue of SZ sources (Planck Collaboration XXIX, 2014A&A...571A..29P, Cat. VIII/91), by imposing a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) threshold of 7 and applying a mask, that excludes the galactic plane and point sources leaving 65 per cent of the sky for the survey. It contains 189 bona fide clusters with associated redshifts and has been used for the cosmological analysis with cluster number counts described in Planck Collaboration XX (2014A&A...571A..20P). (2 data files)