A Suzaku Search for Nonthermal Emission at Hard X-Ray Energies in the Coma Cluster
Abstract
The brightest cluster radio halo known resides in the Coma cluster of galaxies. The relativistic electrons producing this diffuse synchrotron emission should also produce inverse Compton emission that becomes competitive with thermal emission from the intracluster medium (ICM) at hard X-ray energies. Thus far, claimed detections of this emission in Coma are controversial. We present a Suzaku HXD-PIN observation of the Coma cluster in order to nail down its nonthermal hard X-ray content. The contribution of thermal emission to the HXD-PIN spectrum is constrained by simultaneously fitting thermal and nonthermal models to it and a spatially equivalent spectrum derived from an XMM-Newton mosaic of the Coma field. We fail to find statistically significant evidence for nonthermal emission in the spectra which are better described by only a single- or multi-temperature model for the ICM. Including systematic uncertainties, we derive a 90% upper limit on the flux of nonthermal emission of 6.0 10(-12) erg s(-1) cm(-2) (20-80 keV, for Tau = 2.0), which implies a lower limit on the cluster-averaged magnetic field of B greater than 0.15 microG. Our flux upper limit is 2.5 times lower than the detected nonthermal flux from RXTE and BeppoSAX. However, if the nonthermal hard X-ray emission in Coma is more spatially extended than the observed radio halo, the Suzaku HXD-PIN may miss some fraction of the emission. A detailed investigation indicates that approx. 50%-67% of the emission might go undetected, which could make our limit consistent with that of Rephaeli & Gruber and Fusco-Femiano et al. The thermal interpretation of the hard Coma spectrum is consistent with recent analyses of INTEGRAL and Swift data.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA520944
Entities
People
- Alexis Finoguenov
- Craig L. Sarazin
- Daniel R. Wik
- Kazuhiro Nakazawa
- Kyoko Matsushita
- Tracy E Clarke
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory