Astronomers from the College of Alabama in Huntsville have investigated the galaxy cluster Abell 3558 utilizing ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft. Of their outcomes, they detected two large-scale sloshing chilly fronts within the outskirts of this cluster. The discovering was reported in a paper revealed August 30 on the pre-print server arXiv.
Galaxy clusters include as much as hundreds of galaxies certain collectively by gravity. They’re the most important recognized gravitationally certain constructions within the universe, and will function wonderful laboratories for finding out galaxy evolution and cosmology.
At a redshift of 0.048, Abell 3558 is likely one of the clusters within the Abell 3558 cluster advanced situated within the Shapley Supercluster. It has a mass of about 980 trillion solar masses and a radius of some 5.2 million mild years.
Earlier observations of Abell 3558 have discovered a cold front at a distance of roughly 320,000 mild years to the north-west of the cluster’s core. Generally, the so-called chilly fronts are sharp floor brightness discontinuities noticed in X-ray pictures, the place the drop of the floor brightness and fuel density is accompanied by a soar within the fuel temperature, with the denser area colder than the extra rarefied area.
The chilly entrance detected in Abell 3558 is assumed to be on account of large-scale sloshing, induced by a passage of a small galaxy group, possible SC 1327–312, or by an off-axis merger with a extra huge system. A staff of astronomers led by Mohammad Mirakhor has analyzed archival XMM-Newton pictures of Abell 3558 as a way to shed extra mild on this chilly entrance, what resulted within the discovery of two new such options.
The researchers recognized two abrupt floor brightness discontinuities at large-scale radii outdoors the core of Abell 3558 that haven’t been reported beforehand. One among them is situated about 2 million mild years from the cluster core to the south-east and the opposite is located roughly 4 million light years from the cluster core to the north-west.
The spectral analysis confirmed that these two discontinuities are actually large-scale chilly fronts. Based mostly on the collected information, the astronomers estimate that the chilly entrance within the south-east route is about 8.5 billion years outdated.
The invention made by Mirakhor’s staff makes Abell 3558 one in every of only some galaxy clusters that host three or extra chilly fronts. Furthermore, the outermost chilly entrance turned out to be probably the most distant chilly fronts ever noticed in a galaxy cluster, being situated at a higher distance from the core than a lot of the large-scale sloshing cold fronts noticed in galaxy clusters.
In keeping with the authors of the paper, their discovery means that sloshing can prolong effectively past the cooling radius of a galaxy cluster, what implies that it’s a cluster-wide phenomenon.
Extra info:
M. S. Mirakhor et al, Two large-scale sloshing chilly fronts within the outskirts of the galaxy cluster Abell 3558, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2308.16222
Journal info:
arXiv
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Two giant chilly fronts detected within the galaxy cluster Abell 3558 (2023, September 12)
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