MIMIC

MIMIC — Mapping the Intracluster Medium in Chandra — is an X-ray pipeline that turns archival Chandra X-ray Observatory data into maps of the hot intracluster medium (ICM) and hunts for the structures written into it: radio minihalos, cold fronts, shocks, relics and other edges.

The pipeline builds on tooling first written at CASSA (available on GitHub) for downloading and processing galaxy-cluster images from the Chandra archive, and extends it into full ICM mapping with automated front- and edge-detection.

The science motivation reaches back to earlier work on the possible connection between cold fronts and the radio-emitting minihalos of relaxed, massive clusters — cross-checking existing minihalo catalogues against the thermal structure seen in X-rays, and complementing recent MeerKAT radio images of the same systems.