English

Triggering nuclear and galaxy activity in the Bullet cluster

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2020-02-26 v1

Abstract

The analysis of the cluster environment is a valuable instrument to investigate the origin of AGN and star-forming galaxies gas fuelling and trigger mechanisms. To this purpose, we present a detailed analysis of the point-like X-ray sources in the Bullet cluster field. Thanks to 600\sim600 ks Chandra observations, we produced a catalogue of 381 X-ray point sources up to a distance of \sim1.5 virial radius and with flux limits 1×1016\sim1\times10^{-16} and 8×1016\sim8\times10^{-16} erg cm2^{-2} s1^{-1} in the 0.5-2 keV and 2-10 keV bands, respectively. We found a strong (up to a factor 1.5-2) and significant (\ge4σ\sigma) over-density in the full region studied 0.3R200<R<1.5R2000.3R_{200}<R<1.5R_{200}. We identified optical and infrared counterparts for \sim84% and \sim48% of the X-ray sources, respectively. We obtained new spectroscopic redshifts for 106 X-ray sources. Spectroscopic and photometric redshifts of optical and infrared sources have been also collected, and these sources were used as ancillary samples. We find that the over-density in the region 0.3R200<R<R2000.3R_{200}<R<R_{200} is likely due to X-ray AGN (mostly obscured) and star-forming galaxies both associated to the cluster, while in the more external region it is likely mostly due to background AGN. The fraction of cluster galaxies hosting an X-ray detected AGN is 1.0±\pm0.4%\%, nearly constant with the radius, a fraction similar to that reported in other clusters of galaxies at similar redshift. The fraction of X-ray bright AGN (L210keV_{2-10keV}>>1043^{43} ergs s1^{-1}) in the region 0.3R200<R<R2000.3R_{200}<R<R_{200} is 0.50.2+0.60.5^{+0.6}_{-0.2}%\%, higher than that in other clusters at similar redshift and more similar to the AGN fraction in the field. Finally, the spatial distributions of AGN and star-forming galaxies, selected also thanks to their infrared emission, appear similar, thus suggesting that both are triggered by the same mechanism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.00075,
  title  = {Triggering nuclear and galaxy activity in the Bullet cluster},
  author = {S. Puccetti and F. Fiore and A. Bongiorno and K. Boutsia and R. Fassbender and M. Verdugo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.00075},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

28 pages, accepted for publication in the A&A

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:31:38.415Z