CHEX-MATE: New detections and properties of the radio diffuse emission in massive clusters with MeerKAT

Abstract

Copyright and License

© The Authors 2026. Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions, which have improved the presentation of this manuscript. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. LOFAR data products were provided by the LOFAR Surveys Key Science project (LSKSP; https://lofar-surveys.org) and were derived from observations with the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). LOFAR (van Haarlem et al. 2013) is the Low Frequency Array designed and constructed by ASTRON. It has observing, data processing, and data storage facilities in several countries, that are owned by various parties (each with their own funding sources), and that are collectively operated by the ILT foundation under a joint scientific policy. The efforts of the LSKSP have benefited from funding from the European Research Council, NOVA, NWO, CNRS-INSU, the SURF Co-operative, the UK Science and Technology Funding Council and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. This research was supported by the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, through ISSI International Team project #565 (Multi-Wavelength Studies of the Culmination of Structure Formation in the Universe). MB, FG, AB, MR acknowledge the financial contribution from the INAF GO grant 1.05.24.02.10 Extended Radio Emission in Galaxy Clusters at deep focus with MeerKAT. AB acknowledges support from the ERC CoG BELOVED, GA N.101169773. SE and MR acknowledge the financial contribution from the contracts Prin-MUR 2022 supported by Next Generation EU (M4.C2.1.1, n.20227RNLY3 The concordance cosmological model: stress-tests with galaxy clusters), and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant agreement n. 871158). LL acknowledges the financial contribution from the INAF grant 1.05.12.04.01. JS was supported by NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) Grant 80NSSC21K1571. MS acknowledges the financial contributions from contract INAF mainstream project 1.05.01.86.10 and INAF Theory Grant 2023: Gravitational lensing detection of matter distribution at galaxy cluster boundaries and beyond (1.05.23.06.17). EP acknowledges support from CNES, the French national space agency, and from ANR the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, under grant ANR-22-CE31-0010. M.G. acknowledges support from the ERC Consolidator Grant BlackHoleWeather (101086804). R.C. acknowledges financial support from the INAF grant 2023 “Testing the origin of giant radio halos with joint LOFAR-uGMRT observations” (1.05.23.05.11). We acknowledge the developers of the following Python packages which were used in this work: ASTROPY (Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018, 2022), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007), SCIPY (Virtanen et al. 2020), NUMPY (Harris et al. 2020) and PANDAS (McKinney 2010; The pandas development team 2024).