Populations of Magnetized Filaments in the Intracluster Medium and the Galactic Center

TL;DR

This paper compares magnetized filaments in the Galactic Center and intracluster medium, suggesting a common origin related to wind-cloud interactions or turbulence, and highlights their similar properties and potential for mutual study.

Contribution

It proposes that filaments in the Galactic Center and intracluster medium share a common physical origin, enabling new insights through comparative analysis.

Findings

Filaments in both environments show similar morphology and magnetic properties.

Synchrotron aging is observed in both filament populations.

Comparison of filaments from different galaxies can enhance understanding of their origins.

Abstract

Magnetized radio filaments are found in abundance in the inner few hundred pc of our Galaxy. Progress in understanding this population of filaments has been slow, in part due to a lack of detection elsewhere in the Galaxy or in external galaxies. Recent highly sensitive radio continuum observations of radio galaxies in galaxy clusters have revealed remarkable isolated filamentary structures in the ICM that are linked to radio jets, tails and lobes. The origin of this class of filaments is not understood either. Here, we argue that the underlying physical mechanisms responsible for the creation of the two populations are the same because of their similarity in morphology, spacing between the filaments, aspect ratio, magnetic energy densities to thermal pressure of the medium, and that both populations have undergone synchrotron aging. These similarities provide an opportunity to investigate the physical processes in the ISM and ICM for the first time. We consider that the origin of the filaments in both the GC and ICM is a result of the interaction of a large-scale wind with clouds, or the filaments arise through the stretching and collection of field lines by turbulence in weakly magnetized medium. We examine these ideas toward four radio galaxy filaments associated with four radio galaxies IC 40B, IC 4496, J1333-3141, ESO137-006 and argue that much can be understood in the future by comparing these two populations of filaments.