The diffuse intra-cluster component in the Virgo cluster

Structure evolution is now understood to be the products of a Hubble time’s worth of merging, accretion, and interaction with the surrounding environment. This history is hidden, however, being quickly mixed into a smooth and apparently featureless distribution of baryons, or by being at surface brightness much fainter than the sky. The synergy between bright tracers, like Globular Clusters (GCs) and Planetary Nebulae (PNs), and multi-frequency data can solve both of these observational challenges allowing us to investigate the region in space where galaxy halos blend into the intra-cluster component (ICC), a direct product of the interactions within a cluster.

The focus of this talk will be on the nearby Virgo cluster where GCs and PNs have shown that the galaxy halos and the ICC are dynamically distinct with different parent stellar populations and progenitors. Finally, I will talk about a recent study that used the wealth of multi-frequency data to detect for the first time diffuse intra-cluster dust in the intra-cluster medium of Virgo over a scale of 0.4 virial radii.