Discovery and Multi-Wavelength Analysis of a New Dissociative Galaxy Merger: The Champagne Cluster (2501.09901v1)

Abstract: We report the discovery of a new binary galaxy cluster merger, the Champagne Cluster (RM J130558.9+263048.4), using a detection method that identifies dynamically active clusters in the redMaPPer SDSS DR8 photometric galaxy cluster catalog. The Champagne Cluster exhibits the classic X-ray morphology of a post-pericenter dissociative galaxy cluster merger: an X-ray peak located between two galaxy overdensities at the same redshift. We conducted a Keck/DEIMOS survey and obtained redshifts for 103 member galaxies. The redshift analysis indicates a relative velocity of 411 $\pm$ 180 km/s between the two subclusters, which suggests that the merger is happening near the plane of the sky. We used cosmological simulations to find analogous systems to constrain the time since pericenter (74-250 Myr) and the angle the merger axis makes with the plane of the sky (62$^\circ$-90$^\circ$) at the 68$\%$ confidence level. We estimated the bulk temperature (8.20 $\pm 1.2$ keV) and total X-ray luminosity (5.2 $\pm$ 0.8 $\times$ $10^{44}$ erg $\times$ $s^{-1}$) of the intracluster medium using $\textit{Chandra}$ archival data.