Tracing gaseous filaments connected to galaxy clusters: the case study of Abell 2744

TL;DR

This paper presents the first blind detection of gaseous filaments connected to galaxy cluster Abell 2744 using X-ray data and novel filament-finder techniques, confirming the filamentary structure through galaxy distribution analysis.

Contribution

It introduces new statistical methods for identifying gas filaments in X-ray observations and demonstrates their effectiveness in a real galaxy cluster case.

Findings

First blind detection of filaments in X-ray emission

Identification of 3 to 5 filaments connected to Abell 2744

Validation of techniques with galaxy distribution data

Abstract

Filaments connected to galaxy clusters are crucial environments to study the building up of cosmic structures as they funnel matter towards the clusters' deep gravitational potentials. Identifying gas in filaments is a challenge, due to their lower density contrast which produces faint signals. The best chance to detect these signals is therefore in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. We revisit the X-ray observation of the cluster Abell 2744 using statistical estimators of anisotropic matter distribution to identify filamentary patterns around it. We report for the first time the blind detection of filaments connected to a galaxy cluster from X-ray emission using a filament-finder technique and a multipole decomposition technique. We compare this result with filaments extracted from the distribution of spectroscopic galaxies, through which we demonstrate the robustness and reliability of our techniques in tracing a filamentary structure of 3 to 5 filaments connected to Abell 2744.