A NuSTAR observation of the center of the Coma Cluster
Abstract
We present the results of a 55ks NuSTAR observation of the core of the Coma Cluster. The global spectrum can be explained by thermal gas emission, with a conservative 90% upper limit to non-thermal inverse Compton (IC) emission of erg cm s in a 12 arcmin 12 arcmin field of view . The brightness of the thermal component in this central region does not allow more stringent upper limits on the IC component when compared with non-imaging instruments with much larger fields of view where claims of detections have been made. Future mosaic NuSTAR observations of Coma will further address this issue. The temperature map shows a relatively uniform temperature distribution with a gradient from the hot northwest side to the cooler southeast, in agreement with previous measurements. The temperature determination is robust given the flat effective area and low background in the 3-20 keV band, making NuSTAR an ideal instrument to measure high temperatures in the intracluster medium.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1411.1573,
title = {A NuSTAR observation of the center of the Coma Cluster},
author = {F. Gastaldello and D. R. Wik and S. Molendi and N. J. Westergaard and A. Hornstrup and G. Madejski and D. D. M. Ferreira and S. E. Boggs and F. E. Christensen and W. W. Craig and B. W. Grefenstette and C. J. Hailey and F. A. Harrison and K. K. Madsen and D. Stern and W. W. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.1573},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
8 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. Minor changes to match published version