Revisiting scaling relations for giant radio halos in galaxy clusters

Abstract

Many galaxy clusters host megaparsec-scale radio halos, generated by ultrarelativistic electrons in the magnetized intracluster medium. Correlations between the synchrotron power of radio halos and the thermal properties of the hosting clusters were established in the last decade, including the connection between the presence of a halo and cluster mergers. The X-ray luminosity and redshift-limited Extended GMRT Radio Halo Survey provides a rich and unique dataset for statistical studies of the halos. We uniformly analyze the radio and X-ray data for the GMRT cluster sample, and use the new Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) catalog to revisit the correlations between the power of radio halos and the thermal properties of galaxy clusters. We find that the radio power at 1.4 GHz scales with the cluster X-ray (0.1-2.4 keV) luminosity computed within R 500 as . Our bigger and more homogenous sample confirms that the X-ray luminous (L 500 > 5 × 10 44 erg s-1) clusters branch into two populations - radio halos lie on the correlation, while clusters without radio halos have their radio upper limits well below that correlation. This bimodality remains if we excise cool cores from the X-ray luminosities. We also find that P 1.4 scales with the cluster integrated SZ signal within R 500, measured by Planck, as , in line with previous findings. However, contrary to previous studies that were limited by incompleteness and small sample size, we find that "SZ-luminous" Y 500 > 6 × 10-5 Mpc2 clusters show a bimodal behavior for the presence of radio halos, similar to that in the radio-X-ray diagram. Bimodality of both correlations can be traced to clusters dynamics, with radio halos found exclusively in merging clusters. These results confirm the key role of mergers for the origin of giant radio halos, suggesting that they trigger the relativistic particle acceleration. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.