Metal jumps across sloshing cold fronts: The case of A 496

Abstract

Cold-fronts in cool-core clusters are thought to be induced by minor mergers and to develop through a sloshing mechanism. While temperature and surface-brightness jumps have been detected and measured in many systems, a detailed characterization of the metal abundance across the discontinuity is only available for a handful of objects. Within the sloshing scenario, we expect the central cool and metal rich gas to be displaced outwards into lower abundance regions, thus generating a metal discontinuity across the front. We analyzed a long (120 ks) XMM-Newton observation of A 496 to study the metal distribution and its correlation with the cold-fronts. We find Fe discontinuities across the two main cold-fronts located ∼ 60 kpc NNW and ∼ 160 kpc south of the peak and a metal excess in the south direction.