Do radio mini-halos and gas heating in cool-core clusters have a common origin?

Luca Bravi; Myriam Gitti; Gianfranco Brunetti

doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slv137

paper

Do radio mini-halos and gas heating in cool-core clusters have a common origin?

arXiv:1509.06911 · doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slv137

Abstract

In this letter we present a study of the central regions of cool-core clusters hosting radio mini-halos, which are diffuse synchrotron sources extended on cluster-scales surrounding the radio-loud brightest cluster galaxy. We aim to investigate the interplay between the thermal and non-thermal components in the intra-cluster medium in order to get more insights into these radio sources, whose nature is still unclear. It has recently been proposed that turbulence plays a role for heating the gas in cool cores. By assuming that mini-halos are powered by the same turbulence, we expect that the integrated radio luminosity of mini-halos, $ν P_{ν}$ , depends on the cooling flow power, $P_{CF}$ , which in turn constrains the energy available for the non-thermal components and emission in the cool-core region. We carried out a homogeneous re-analysis of X-ray Chandra data of the largest sample of cool-core clusters hosting radio mini-halos currently available ( $\sim$ 20 objects), finding a quasi-linear correlation, $ν P_{ν} \propto P_{CF}^{0.8}$ . We show that the scenario of a common origin of radio mini-halos and gas heating in cool-core clusters is energetically viable, provided that mini-halos trace regions where the magnetic field strength is $B ≫ 0.5 μ$ G .

6 pages, 2 figures; MNRAS Letters in press

Do radio mini-halos and gas heating in cool-core clusters have a common origin?

Abstract

References in corpus (9)

Cited by in corpus (28)