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M.C. Ronquest (University of Maryland, Baltimore County Department of Physics), M. J. Henriksen (UMBC Department of Physics and NASA/GSFC Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics)
Using a 41,000 second ROSAT PSPC image of the A2199 cluster of galaxies, we have completed a spatial search for emission in excess of the thermal component. The radial surface brightness profile is well fit by the standard "Beta Model" profile out to 2 Mpc. Making the simple assumptions that non-thermal X-ray emission originates from Inverse Compton scattering of relativistic electrons off of the microwave background photons and that the magnetic field is frozen into the intracluster medium, we have produced a non-thermal radial profile using the radio synchrotron spectrum parameters. This non-thermal profile diverges significantly from the beta-model with increasing radius. The image has a high signal-to-noise ratio over most of the cluster and constrains the maximum allowable ratio of non-thermal to total emission to be less than 1%. This value is normalized to the same energy band and region as the previoulsy reported value of 17% based on SAX observations (Kaastra et al., 1999, ApJ, 519L, 119). We further explore more generalized models for the radial distribution of non-thermal emission.
This research was supported by NASA and NSF.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mronqu1@umbc.edu