Discovery of an X-ray bridge between the comma-shaped gas and the main cluster in MCXC J0157.4-0550

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of an X-ray filament connecting a gas structure and a galaxy cluster, supported by weak-lensing data, providing insights into the cluster merger dynamics and gas stripping processes.

Contribution

The study presents the first detection of an X-ray bridge in MCXC J0157.4-0550, combining X-ray imaging and weak-lensing analysis to understand merger geometry and gas dynamics.

Findings

Detection of a faint X-ray bridge at 5.5σ significance.

Mass estimates for main and sub components from weak lensing.

Constraints on merger velocity (~1000 km/s) and impact parameter (0.9 Mpc).

Abstract

We report the discovery of a faint X-ray bridge connecting between the comma-shaped gas and the main cluster in MCXC J0157.4-0550, using {\it XMM-Newton} image. The filamentary structure is found in a model-independent manner in both topological features and Gaussian Gradient Magnitude filtering. The X-ray surface brightness profile perpendicular to the filament is detected at a $5.5\sigma$ level. Weak-lensing (WL) analysis using the Subaru/HSC-SSP Survey archive data strongly supports the two mass components. Given a prior from the stellar masses, we obtain $M_{200}^{\rm main}=2.68_{-0.92}^{+1.11}\times 10^{14}\,h_{70}^{-1}M_\odot$ and $M_{200}^{\rm sub}=0.46_{-0.22}^{+0.38}\times 10^{14}\,h_{70}^{-1}M_\odot$. The main axis of the projected halo distribution is more likely to align with the direction of the main cluster than to be oriented perpendicularly. Similar X-ray distributions have been identified in the literature on numerical simulations. The filamentary structure forms in the following manner: as the gas is stripped by ram pressure near the pericenter, it gets dragged by tidal rotation. Once free from this rotation, the gas moves inertially in a direction parallel to the tangential velocity at the pericenter. The comma-shaped gas, with tails pointing in the opposite direction to the main cluster, is also formed by the current tidal rotation as it moves away from the main cluster. This warrants us that, although it is sometimes thought based on the X-ray morphology alone that the tail is pointing in the opposite direction to the merger motion, this is not necessarily the case. The information of the X-ray filamentary remnant from the cluster merger, together with the 2D WL shear data, provides constraints on the merger parameters, indicating an infalling velocity of approximately $1000\, {\rm km\, s^{-1}}$ and an impact parameter of $0.9$ Mpc.