#paperday "Morphology of radio relics I: What causes the substructure of synchrotron emission?" work with @franco_vazza, @HambObs and collaborators accepted in MNRAS. *THREAD*

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13514 

#magcow #radioemission

What are we doing here? We are simulating synchrotron emission using the diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) model (on the fly!) in a small turbulent region of the ICM. With this study we can focus on the substructure observed in some radio relics

What do we find?
1) We found that Mach numbers derived from radio are biased towards large Mach numbers in contrast to X-ray derived Mach numbers... why? turbulence plays a major role!

2) We study the spectral index evolution of the synchrotron emission and found out that the relation alpha_int = alpha + 0.5 does not hold always, so one needs to be careful when assuming it holds

3) The characteristic length of the synchrotron emission and the one of the magnetic field are not simply correlated! but of the same order

4) So what do shocks do to a turbulent magnetic turbulent medium? First they compress --> second they generate more turbulence. We can see this in the evolution of the magnetic power spectra. The second part will be seen as a shift of magnetic power towards larger scales

Many more details!!! buuuuuut check the paper out!! :)