Bent-Double Radio Sources as Probes of Intergalactic Gas

Abstract

As the most common environment in the universe, groups of galaxies are likely to contain a significant fraction of the missing baryons in the form of intergalactic gas. The density of this gas is an important factor in whether ram pressure stripping and strangulation affect the evolution of galaxies in these systems. We present a method for measuring the density of intergalactic gas using bent-double radio sources that is independent of temperature, making it complementary to current absorption line measurements. We use this method to probe intergalactic gas in two different environments: inside a small group of galaxies as well as outside of a larger group at a 2 Mpc radius and measure total gas densities of $4\pm 1_{-2}^{+6}\times 10^{-3}$ and $9\pm 3_{-5}^{+10}\times 10^{-4}$ per cubic centimeter (random and systematic errors) respectively. We use X-ray data to place an upper limit of $2\times 10^6$ K on the temperature of the intragroup gas in the small group.

6 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• Probing the Dark Matter and Gas Fraction in Relaxed Galaxy Groups with X-ray observations from Chandra and XMM
• Gas stripping in galaxy groups - the case of the starburst spiral NGC 2276
• Ram pressure stripping of an isolated Local Group dwarf galaxy: evidence for an intra-group medium
• Jet Speeds in Wide Angle Tailed Radio Galaxies

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• Using the morphology and magnetic fields of tailed radio galaxies as environmental probes
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• Testing the correlation between bending angle and polarization properties of bent radio galaxies
• How does environment affect the morphology of radio AGN?
• The origin of lopsidedness in galaxies