Cosmic rays in magnetized intracluster plasma

Abstract

A breakthrough in the studies of magnetic fields in clusters of galaxies has been reached in recent years from the analysis of the Rotation Measure of sources seen through the magnetized cluster medium (Govoni & Feretti 2004). The results obtained can be summarized as follows: (i) magnetic fields are present in all clusters; (ii) at the center of clusters undergoing merger activity the field strenght is around 1 μ G , whereas at the center of relaxed cooling core clusters the intensity is much higher (~ 10 μ G ); (iii) a model involving a single magnetic field coherence scale is not suitable to describe the observational data, because of different scales of field ordering and tangling.