Another shock for the Bullet cluster, and the source of seed electrons for radio relics

ABSTRACT With Australia Telescope Compact Array observations, we detect a highly elongatedMpc-scale diffuse radio source on the eastern periphery of the Bullet cluster 1E0657-55.8,which we argue has the positional, spectral and polarimetric characteristics of a radio relic.This powerful relic (2:3 0:1 10 25 WHz 1 ) consists of a bright northern bulb and a faintlinear tail. The bulb emits 94% of the observed radio flux and has the highest surface bright-ness of any known relic. Exactly coincident with the linear tail we find a sharp X-ray surfacebrightness edge in the deep Chandra image of the cluster – a signature of a shock front inthe hot intracluster medium (ICM), located on the opposite side of the cluster to the famousbow shock. This new example of an X-ray shock coincident with a relic further supports thehypothesis that shocks in the outer regions of clusters can form relics via diffusive shock (re-)acceleration. Intriguingly, our new relic suggests that seed electrons for reacceleration arecoming from a local remnant of a radio galaxy, which we are lucky to catch before its com-plete disruption. If this scenario, in which a relic forms when a shock crosses a well-definedregion of the ICM polluted with aged relativistic plasma – as opposed to the usual assumptionthat seeds are uniformly mixed in the ICM – is also the case for other relics, this may explaina number of peculiar properties of peripheral relics.Key words: radiation mechanisms: non-thermal – acceleration of particles – shock waves –galaxies: clusters: individual: 1E 0657-55.8 – galaxies: clusters: intracluster medium – radiocontinuum general