Collision of Merger and Accretion Shocks: Formation of Mpc-scale Contact Discontinuity in the Perseus Cluster

Abstract

Two Mpc-size contact discontinuities have recently been identified in the XMM-Newton and Suzaku X-ray observations of the outskirts of the Perseus cluster (Walker et al. 2020). These structures have been tentatively interpreted as "sloshing cold fronts", which are customarily associated with differential motions of the cluster gas, perturbed by a merger. In this study we consider an alternative scenario, namely, that the most prominent discontinuity near the cluster virial radius is the result of the collision between the accretion shock and the "runaway" merger shock. We also discuss the possible origin of the second discontinuity at ~1.2 Mpc.

5 pages, 3 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

References in corpus (6)

• The Quiescent Intracluster Medium in the Core of the Perseus Cluster
• Turbulent Heating in Galaxy Clusters Brightest in X-rays
• Mass Accretion and its Effects on the Self-Similarity of Gas Profiles in the Outskirts of Galaxy Clusters
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• Resilience of Sloshing Cold Fronts against Subsequent Minor Mergers
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