No shock across part of a radio relic in the merging galaxy cluster ZwCl 2341.1+0000?

The galaxy cluster ZwCl 2341.1+0000 is a merging system at z = 0.27, which hosts two radio relics and a central, faint, filamentary radio structure. The two radio relics have unusually flat integrated spectral indices of -0.49 ± 0.18 and -0.76 ± 0.17, values that cannot be easily reconciled with the theory of standard diffusive shock acceleration of thermal particles at weak merger shocks. We present imaging results from XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of the cluster, aimed to detect and characterize density discontinuities in the intracluster medium. As expected, we detect a density discontinuity near each of the radio relics. However, if these discontinuities are the shock fronts that fuelled the radio emission, then their Mach numbers are surprisingly low, both ≤2. We studied the aperture of the density discontinuities, and found that while the NW discontinuity spans the whole length of the NW radio relic, the arc spanned by the SE discontinuity is shorter than the arc spanned by the SE relic. This startling result is in apparent contradiction with our current understanding of the origin of radio relics. Deeper X-ray data are required to confirm our results and to determine the nature of the density discontinuities.