Searching For Non-thermal X-rays In The Brightest X-ray And Radio Galaxy Clusters

Details Searching For Non-thermal X-rays In The Brightest X-ray And Radio Galaxy Clusters Searching For Non-thermal X-rays In The Brightest X-ray And Radio Galaxy Clusters

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21920702w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #207.02

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The relativistic electrons generating large-scale radio halos and relics in galaxy clusters must also produce inverse Compton (IC) emission at X-ray energies, a measurement of which can yield a cluster's volume-averaged magnetic field strength B. However, unambiguous IC detections in these clusters are rare at best and complicated by challenging observational limitations. To mitigate these difficulties, we extract spatially coincident spectra at soft and hard energies from the XMM-Newton EPIC and Swift BAT detectors, respectively, to search for non-thermal excesses above clusters' thermal emission. In a sample of the brightest X-ray clusters, drawn from HIFLUGCS, we fail to find convincing evidence for an excess in any of the clusters, either individually or when their spectra are stacked. The subset of clusters with the strongest non-thermal indication, however, are those hosting radio halos and/or relics, which are also the clusters expected to have IC tails. From this subsample of 9 clusters, we expand our sample to include those with the 30 brightest halos and relics. We stack their spectra to search for stronger statistical evidence of IC emission at hard X-ray energies, which constrains the typical average value of B in these clusters.
On top of institutional funding, we acknowledge support from NASA-funded Suzaku and XMM-Newton grants, as well as the NASA Postdoctoral Program for funding DRW. Also, this work would not be possible without the hard work of the entire Swift BAT survey team, who we heartily thank.

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