RADIAL PROFILE OF THE 3.5 keV LINE OUT TO R {sub 200} IN THE PERSEUS CLUSTER
- Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 2, Leiden (Netherlands)
- Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 (United States)
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
- Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 2, Leiden (Netherlands)
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 880 Greenbelt Road, MD 20771 (United States)
- Discovery Center, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen (Denmark)
- CRESST and X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
The recent discovery of the unidentified emission line at 3.5 keV in galaxies and clusters has attracted great interest from the community. As the origin of the line remains uncertain, we study the surface brightness distribution of the line in the Perseus cluster since that information can be used to identify its origin. We examine the flux distribution of the 3.5 keV line in the deep Suzaku observations of the Perseus cluster in detail. The 3.5 keV line is observed in three concentric annuli in the central observations, although the observations of the outskirts of the cluster did not reveal such a signal. We establish that these detections and the upper limits from the non-detections are consistent with a dark matter decay origin. However, absence of positive detection in the outskirts is also consistent with some unknown astrophysical origin of the line in the dense gas of the Perseus core, as well as with a dark matter origin with a steeper dependence on mass than the dark matter decay. We also comment on several recently published analyses of the 3.5 keV line.
- OSTI ID:
- 22667373
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 829, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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