XMM-Newton observation of the interacting cluster Abell 3528

We analyze the XMM-Newton dataset of the interacting cluster of galaxies Abell 3528 located westward in the core of the Shapley Supercluster, the largest concentration of mass in the nearby Universe. A3528 is formed by two interacting clumps (A3528-N at North and A3528-S at South) separated by 0.9  h70-1 Mpc at redshift 0.053. XMM-Newton data describe these clumps as a relaxed structure with an overall temperature of 4.14 +- 0.09and 4.29 +- 0.07 keV in A3528-N and A3528-S, respectively, and a core cooler by a factor 1.4-1.5 and super-solar metal abundance in the inner 30 arcsec. These clumps are connected by a X-ray soft, bridgelike emission and present an asymmetric surface brightness with significant excess in the North-West region of A3528-N and in the North-East area of A3528-S. However, we do not observe any evidence of shock heated gas, both in the surface brightness and in the temperature map. Considering also that the optical light distribution is more concentrated around A3528-N and makes A3528-S barely detectable, we do not find support for the originally suggested head-on pre-merging scenario and conclude that A3528 is in an off-axis post-merging phase, where the closest core encounter happened about 1-2 Gyrs ago.