Rotation measure synthesis applied to synthetic SKA images of galaxy clusters

Abstract

Future observations with next-generation radio telescopes will help us to understand the presence and evolution of magnetic fields in galaxy clusters through determination of the so-called rotation measure (RM). In this work, we applied the RM synthesis technique to synthetic first phase Square Kilometre Array mid frequency element (i.e. the SKA1-MID) radio images of a pair of merging galaxy clusters, measured between 950 and 1750 MHz with a resolution of 10 arcsec and thermal noise of 0.1μJy beam-1. The results of our RM synthesis analysis are compared with the simulation input parameters. We study two cases: one with radio haloes at the cluster centres and another without. We found that the information obtained with RM synthesis is in general agreement with the input information; however, some discrepancies are present. We characterize them in this work, with the final goal of determining the potential impact of SKA1-MID on the study of cluster magnetic fields.