Radio relics in massive galaxy cluster mergers in the TNG-Cluster simulation

¹ Yonsei University, Department of Astronomy, Seoul, Republic of Korea
e-mail: wonki.lee@yonsei.ac.kr, mkjee@yonsei.ac.kr
² Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
³ Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
⁴ Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, ITA, Albert Ueberle Str. 2, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
⁵ Department of Physics, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA
⁶ Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
⁷ IPAC, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

Received: 7 October 2023
Accepted: 20 February 2024

Abstract

Radio relics are diffuse synchrotron sources in the outskirts of merging galaxy clusters energized by the merger shocks. In this paper, we present an overview of the radio relics in massive cluster mergers identified in the new TNG-Cluster simulation. This is a suite of magnetohydrodynamical cosmological zoom-in simulations of 352 massive galaxy clusters with M_500c = 10^{14.0 − 15.3} M_⊙ sampled from a 1 Gpc-sized cosmological box. The simulations were performed using the moving-mesh code AREPO with the galaxy formation model and high numerical resolution consistent with the TNG300 run of the IllustrisTNG series. We post-processed the shock properties obtained from the on-the-fly shock finder to estimate the diffuse radio emission generated by cosmological shockwaves for a total of ∼300 radio relics at redshift z = 0 − 1. TNG-Cluster returned a variety of radio relics with diverse morphologies, encompassing classical examples of double radio relics, single relics, and “inverted” radio relics that are convex to the cluster center. Moreover, the simulated radio relics reproduced both the abundance and statistical relations of observed relics. We find that extremely large radio relics (> 2 Mpc) are predominantly produced in massive cluster mergers with M_500c ≳ 8 × 10¹⁴ M_⊙. This underscores the significance of simulating massive mergers to study giant radio relics similar to those found in observations. We released a library of radio relics from the TNG-Cluster simulation, which will serve as a crucial reference for upcoming next-generation surveys.