Massimiliano Galeazzi, Anjali Gupta, Kevin Huffenberger, Eugenio Ursino
We have used the angular Autocorrelation Function (AcF) on the angular scale of a few arcminutes to detect and characterize the emission from the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) in a pointing with Chandra's ACIS-S instrument. We focused our attention on the energy bands 0.4-0.6 keV, where the WHIM emission is expected to be strongest, due to the redshifted O VII and O VIII lines, and 0.7-0.9 keV, where the WHIM emission is expected to be significantly smaller. After removing identified point sources, and any spurious signal due to detector background and unidentified point sources, in the lower energy band we found a clear AcF signal that we attribute to the WHIM, with a statistical significance of several sigmas (chi2=129, N=31). The attribution of the signal to the WHIM (and not to other spurious emissions, such as unresolved point sources) is confirmed by the higher energy band where the signal is compatible with zero.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5753
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