On the Origin of the Ancient, Large-scale Cold Front in the Perseus Cluster of Galaxies

The intracluster medium of the Perseus Cluster exhibits spiral-shaped X-ray surface brightness discontinuities known as “cold fronts,” which simulations indicate are caused by the sloshing motion of the gas after the passage of a subcluster. Recent observations of Perseus have shown that these fronts extend to large radii. In this work, we present simulations of the formation of sloshing cold fronts in Perseus using the AREPO magnetohydrodynamics code, to produce a plausible scenario for the formation of the large front at a radius of 700 kpc. Our simulations explore a range of subcluster masses and impact parameters. We find that low-mass subclusters cannot generate a cold front that can propagate to such a large radius, and that small impact parameters create too much turbulence, which leads to the disruption of the cold front before it reaches such a large distance. Subclusters that make only one core passage produce a stable initial front that expands to large radii, but without a second core passage of the subcluster, other fronts are not created at a later time in the core region. We find a small range of simulations with subclusters with mass ratios of R ∼ 1:5 and an initial impact parameter of θ ∼ 20°–25° that not only produce the large cold front but a second set in the core region at later times. These simulations indicate that the “ancient” cold front is ∼6–8.5 Gyr old. For the simulations providing the closest match with observations, the subcluster has completely merged into the main cluster.