Minor merger-induced cold fronts in Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638

Details Minor merger-induced cold fronts in Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638 Minor merger-induced cold fronts in Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638

2011-09-26

arxiv.org/abs/1109.5692v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

25 pages, 15 figures, 6 tables. Complete versions of Tables 3 and 4 are included as ancillary files. Accepted for publication

Scientific paper

We present evidence for the existence of substructure in the "relaxed appearing" cold front clusters Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638. The detection of these substructures was made possible by comprehensive multi-object optical spectroscopy obtained with the Hectospec and DEep Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph instruments on the 6.5m MMT and 10m Keck II telescope, respectively. These observations produced 956 and 400 spectroscopically confirmed cluster members within a projected radius of 3Mpc from the centers of Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638, respectively. The substructure manifests itself as local peaks in the spatial distribution of member galaxies and also as regions of localized velocity substructure. For both Abell 2142 and RXJ1720.1+2638, we identify group-scale substructures which, when considering the morphology of the cold fronts and the time since pericentric passage of a perturber estimated from the cold front radii, could plausibly have perturbed the cluster cores and generated the cold fronts observed in Chandra images. The results presented here are consistent with cold fronts being the result of merger activity and with cold fronts in relaxed appearing clusters being due to minor merger activity.

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