Searching for Sharp Surface Brightness Discontinuities: a Systematic Study of Cold Fronts in Galaxy Clusters

Abstract

We perform a systematic search of cold fronts in a sample of 62 clusters observed with XMM-Newton with redshift ranging from 0.01 to 0.3. We detect one or more cold fronts in 21 (34%) of our objects. A large fraction (87.5%) of nearby clusters 0.01 < z < 0.04 host a cold front while only 20% of the distant clusters, mostly merging clusters, do so. The absence of sharp surface brightness discontinuites in distant cool cores is most likely a consequence of the insufficent spatial resolution of our images. Some nearby cool core clusters show a dislocation between the surface brightness and the pressure peak. This implies that the cool central gas is displaced from the bottom of the gravitational potential well and likely sloshing.