1. A MeerKAT-meets-LOFAR study of MS 1455.0 + 2232: a 590 kiloparsec ‘mini’-halo in a sloshing cool-core cluster
- Author
-
C J Riseley, K Rajpurohit, F Loi, A Botteon, R Timmerman, N Biava, A Bonafede, E Bonnassieux, G Brunetti, T Enßlin, G Di Gennaro, A Ignesti, T Shimwell, C Stuardi, T Vernstrom, and R J van Weeren
- Subjects
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) ,Galaxies - clusters - individual - MS 1455.0+2232 ,Space and Planetary Science ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Radio continuum - general ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,Astrophysics::Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics ,Galaxies - clusters - general ,X-rays - galaxies - clusters ,Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,Galaxies - clusters - intracluster medium ,Astrophysics::Galaxy Astrophysics - Abstract
Radio mini-haloes are poorly-understood, moderately-extended diffuse radio sources that trace the presence of magnetic fields and relativistic electrons on scales of hundreds of kiloparsecs, predominantly in relaxed clusters. With relatively few confirmed detections to-date, many questions remain unanswered. This paper presents new radio observations of the galaxy cluster MS1455.0$+$2232 performed with MeerKAT (covering the frequency range 872$-$1712 MHz) and LOFAR (covering 120$-$168 MHz), the first results from a homogeneously selected mini-halo census. We find that this mini-halo extends for $\sim590$ kpc at 1283 MHz, significantly larger than previously believed, and has a flatter spectral index ($\alpha = -0.97 \pm 0.05$) than typically expected. Our X-ray analysis clearly reveals a large-scale (254 kpc) sloshing spiral in the intracluster medium. We perform a point-to-point analysis, finding a tight single correlation between radio and X-ray surface brightness with a super-linear slope of $b_{\rm 1283~MHz} = 1.16^{+0.06}_{-0.07}$ and $b_{\rm 145~MHz} = 1.15^{+0.09}_{-0.08}$; this indicates a strong link between the thermal and non-thermal components of the intracluster medium. Conversely, in the spectral index/X-ray surface brightness plane, we find that regions inside and outside the sloshing spiral follow different correlations. We find compelling evidence for multiple sub-components in this mini-halo for the first time. While both the turbulent (re-)acceleration and hadronic scenarios are able to explain some observed properties of the mini-halo in MS1455.0$+$2232, neither scenario is able to account for all the evidence presented by our analysis., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Manuscript contains 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF