The intracluster magnetic field power spectrum in Abell 665

By D. Guidetti, M. Murgia, F. Govoni, P. Parma, L. Gregorini, H. D. Ruiter, R. Cameron, R. Fanti. 2007

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The goal of this work is to investigate the power spectrum of the magnetic field associated with the giant radio halo in the galaxy cluster A665. For this, we present new deep Very Large Array total intensity and polarization observations at 1.4 GHz. We simulated Gaussian random three-dimensional turbulent magnetic field models to reproduce the observed radio halo emission. By comparing observed and synthetic radio halo images we constrained the strength and structure of the intracluster magnetic field. We assumed that the magnetic field power spectrum is a power law with a Kolmogorov index and we imposed a local equipartition of energy density between relativistic particles and field. Under these assumptions, we find that the radio halo emission in A665 is consistent with a central magnetic field strength of about 1.3 micro-G. To explain the azimuthally averaged radio brightness profile, the magnetic field energy density should decrease following the thermal gas density, leading to an averaged magnetic field strength over the central 1 Mpc^3 of about 0.75 micro-G. From the observed brightness fluctuations of the radio halo, we infer that the outer scale of the magnetic field power spectrum is ~450 kpc, and the corresponding magnetic field auto-correlation length is ~100 kpc.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d99d74fb9437b27adf01b240dcf3ade702114bd

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Citations in the corpus

A new bound on axion-like particles (2017, result): “This value is also consistent with more elaborate magnetic field models from other clusters [74].”
Turbulent Motions and Shocks Waves in Galaxy Clusters simulated with AMR (2009, background): “Also studies of Faraday Rotation allow a complementary approach and suggest that the IGM magnetic field is turbulent on a broad range of scales (Murgia et al.2004; Govoni et al.2006; Ensslin & Vogt (2006).”