Low frequency follow up of radio halos and relics in the GMRT Radio Halo Cluster Survey

TL;DR

This study used GMRT low-frequency observations to analyze the spectral properties and morphology of radio halos and relics in galaxy clusters, revealing diverse spectral indices, complex brightness distributions, and new candidate sources, advancing understanding of particle acceleration in clusters.

Contribution

The paper presents new low-frequency GMRT observations of radio halos and relics, uncovering a wider range of spectral indices and complex morphologies, and identifying new candidate sources and correlations.

Findings

Spectral indices of halos range from 1.2 to 1.9.

Discovery of new relic candidates in A1300 and A1682.

Detection of bridges connecting halos and relics.

Abstract

We performed GMRT low frequency observations of the radio halos, relics and new candidates belonging to the GMRT Radio Halo Cluster Sample first observed at 610 MHz. High sensitivity imaging was performed using the GMRT at 325 MHz and 240 MHz. The properties of the diffuse emission in each cluster were compared to our 610 MHz images and/or literature information available at other frequencies, in order to derive the integrated spectra over a wide frequency range.Beyond the classical radio halos, whose spectral index $\alpha$ is in the range $\sim1.2\div1.3$ (S$\propto\nu^{-\alpha}$), we found sources with $\alpha\sim1.6\div1.9$. This result supports the idea that the spectra of the radiating particles in radio halos is not universal, and that inefficient mechanisms of particle acceleration are responsible for their origin. We also found a variety of brightness distributions, i.e. centrally peaked as well as clumpy halos. Even though the thermal and relativistic plasma tend to occupy the same cluster volume, in some cases a positional shift between the radio and X-ray peaks of emission is evident. Our observations also revealed the existence of diffuse cluster sources which cannot be easily classified either as halos or relics. New candidate relics were found in A1300 and in A1682, and in some clusters "bridges" of radio emission have been detected, connecting the relic and radio halo emission. Combining our new data with literature information, we derived the LogL$_{\rm X}$-LogP$_{\rm 325 MHz}$ correlation for radio halos, and investigated the possible trend of the spectral index of radio halos with the temperature of the intracluster medium.