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The split in the ancient cold front in the Perseus cluster

Nature Astronomy volume 2, pages 292–296 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sloshing cold fronts in clusters, produced as the dense cluster core moves around in the cluster potential in response to in-falling subgroups, provide a powerful probe of the physics of the intracluster medium and the magnetic fields permeating it1,2. These sharp discontinuities in density and temperature rise gradually outwards with age in a characteristic spiral pattern, embedding into the intracluster medium a record of the minor merging activity of clusters: the further from the cluster centre a cold front is, the older it is. Recently, it was discovered that these cold fronts can survive out to extremely large radii in the Perseus cluster3. Here, we report on high-spatial-resolution Chandra observations of the large-scale cold front in Perseus. We find that rather than broadening through diffusion, the cold front remains extremely sharp (consistent with abrupt jumps in density) and instead is split into two sharp edges. These results show that magnetic draping can suppress diffusion for vast periods of time—around ~5 Gyr—even as the cold front expands out to nearly half the cluster virial radius.

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Fig. 1: Wide-field X-ray observations compared with simulations.
Fig. 2: Deep Chandra observations.
Fig. 3: Simulations of cold front development with time.
Fig. 4: Simulations of cold front structure development.

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Acknowledgements

S.A.W. was supported by an appointment to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by the Universities Space Research Association through a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A.F. acknowledges support from European Research Council Advanced Grant FEEDBACK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astrophysics Science Division, X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Stephen A. Walker

  2. Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA

    John ZuHone

  3. Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Andy Fabian

  4. Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany

    Jeremy Sanders

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Contributions

S.A.W. wrote the manuscript with comments from all authors. S.A.W. performed the Chandra and XMM-Newton data analysis and led the Chandra proposal. J.Z. produced the galaxy cluster sloshing simulations.

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Correspondence to Stephen A. Walker.

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Walker, S.A., ZuHone, J., Fabian, A. et al. The split in the ancient cold front in the Perseus cluster. Nat Astron 2, 292–296 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0401-8

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