A3571, The Brightest Line of Sight Bullet?

Abell 3571 is one of the richest and hottest clusters in the Shapley Supercluster. At a redshift of 0.04 it is the 6th brightest cluster in the X-ray sky. Despite being a B-M type I and apparently well behaved, evidence for dynamic activity in the cluster has been increasing both from the optical and X-ray observations.

Here, we show the results of spatially resolved spectroscopy from a relatively shallow Chandra observation of A3571. We show that the temperature distribution has a strongly bi-modal distribution around the NE-SW axis crossing the central region, strongly suggesting that a strong merger is happening . The distribution of density, abundances and gas velocities support a scenario where the merging is transonic-supersonic with the axis is near the line of sight.