A spectroscopic survey of Abell 1703: is it a rare relaxed cluster hosting a radio halo or a usual merging system?

We present the study of the internal dynamics of the intriguing galaxy cluster Abell 1703, a system hosting a probable giant radio halo whose dynamical status is still controversial. Our analysis is based on unpublished spectroscopic data acquired at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo and data publicly available in the literature. We also use photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We select 147 cluster members and compute the cluster redshift ̃ 0.277 and the global line-of-sight velocity dispersion σv ̃ 1300 km s-1. We infer that Abell 1703 is a massive cluster: M200 ̃ 1-2 × 1015 M☉. The results of our study disagree with the picture of an unimodal, relaxed cluster as suggested by previous studies based on the gravitational lensing analysis and support the view of a perturbed dynamics proposed by recent works based on Chandra X-ray data. The first strong evidence of a dynamically disturbed cluster comes from the peculiarity of the BCG velocity with respect to the first moment of the velocity distribution of member galaxies. Moreover, several statistical tests employed to study the cluster galaxies kinematics find significant evidence of substructure, being Abell 1703 composed by at least two or three subclumps probably caught after the core-core passage. In this observational scenario, the suspected existence of a radio halo in the centre of this cluster is not surprising and well agrees with the theoretical models describing diffuse radio sources in clusters.