A massive warm baryonic halo in the Coma Cluster

Several deep PSPC observations of the Coma Cluster reveal a very large scale halo of soft X-ray emission, substantially in excess of the well-known radiation from the hot intracluster medium. The excess emission, previously reported in the central region of the cluster using lower sensitivity Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) and ROSAT data, is now evident out to a radius of 2.6 Mpc, demonstrating that the soft excess radiation from clusters is a phenomenon of cosmological significance. The X-ray spectrum at these large radii cannot be modeled nonthermally but is consistent with the original scenario of thermal emission from warm gas at similar to10(6) K. The mass of the warm gas is on par with that of the hot X-ray emitting plasma and significantly more massive if the warm gas resides in low-density lamentary structures. Thus, the data lend vital support to current theories of cosmic evolution, which predict that at low redshift similar to30%-40% of the baryons reside in warm laments converging at clusters of galaxies.