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Register a new userThe Intracluster Plasma: a Universal Pressure Profile?
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The pressure profiles of the Intracluster Plasma in galaxy clusters show a wide variance when observed in X rays at low redshifts z<0.2. We find the profiles to follow two main patterns, featuring either a steep or a shallow shape throughout both core and outskirts. We trace these shapes back to a physical dichotomy of clusters into two classes, marked by either low entropy (LE) or high entropy (HE) throughout. From X-ray observations and Sunyaev-Zeldovich stacked data at higher 0.2<z<0.4, we elicit evidence of an increasing abundance of HEs relative to LEs. We propose this to constitute a systematic trend toward high z; specifically, we predict the pressure profiles to converge into a truly universal HE-like template for z>0.5. We submit our physical templates and converging trend for further observational tests, in view of the current and upcoming measurements of individual, stacked, and integrated Sunyaev-Zeldovich signals.
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The angular power spectrum of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect is highly sensitive to cosmological parameters such as sigma_8 and Omega_m, but its use as a precision cosmological probe is hindered by the astrophysical uncertainties in modeling the gas pressure profile in galaxy groups and clusters. In this paper we assume that the relevant cosmological parameters are accurately known and explore the ability of current and future tSZ power spectrum measurements to constrain the intracluster gas pressure or the evolution of the gas mass fraction, f_gas. We use the CMB bandpower measurements from the South Pole Telescope and a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to quantify deviations from the standard, universal gas pressure model. We explore analytical model extensions that bring the predictions for the tSZ power into agreement with experimental data. We find that a steeper pressure profile in the cluster outskirts or an evolving f_gas have mild-to-severe conflicts with experimental data or simulations. Varying more than one parameter in the pressure model leads to strong degeneracies that cannot be broken with current observational constraints. We use simulated bandpowers from future tSZ survey experiments, in particular a possible 2000 deg^2 CCAT survey, to show that future observations can provide almost an order of magnitude better precision on the same model parameters. This will allow us to break the current parameter degeneracies and place simultaneous constraints on the gas pressure profile and its redshift evolution, for example.
Recent results are reported on Magnetic Fields in Clusters of Galaxies, Diffuse Radio Emission, and Radio - X-ray connection in Radio Halos.
We present a simple empirical function for the average density profile of cosmic voids, identified via the watershed technique in $Lambda$CDM N-body simulations. This function is universal across void size and redshift, accurately describing a large radial range of scales around void centers with only two free parameters. In analogy to halo density profiles, these parameters describe the scale radius and the central density of voids. While we initially start with a more general four-parameter model, we find two of its parameters to be redundant, as they follow linear trends with the scale radius in two distinct regimes of the void sample, separated by its compensation scale. Assuming linear theory, we derive an analytic formula for the velocity profile of voids and find an excellent agreement with the numerical data as well. In our companion paper [Sutter et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 442, 462 (2014)] the presented density profile is shown to be universal even across tracer type, properly describing voids defined in halo and galaxy distributions of varying sparsity, allowing us to relate various void populations by simple rescalings. This provides a powerful framework to match theory and simulations with observational data, opening up promising perspectives to constrain competing models of cosmology and gravity.
Based on sensitive CO measurements from HERACLES and HI data from THINGS, we show that the azimuthally averaged radial distribution of the neutral gas surface density (Sigma_HI + Sigma_H2) in 33 nearby spiral galaxies exhibits a well-constrained universal exponential distribution beyond 0.2*r25 (inside of which the scatter is large) with less than a factor of two scatter out to two optical radii r25. Scaling the radius to r25 and the total gas surface density to the surface density at the transition radius, i.e., where Sigma_HI and Sigma_H2 are equal, as well as removing galaxies that are interacting with their environment, yields a tightly constrained exponential fit with average scale length 0.61+-0.06 r25. In this case, the scatter reduces to less than 40% across the optical disks (and remains below a factor of two at larger radii). We show that the tight exponential distribution of neutral gas implies that the total neutral gas mass of nearby disk galaxies depends primarily on the size of the stellar disk (influenced to some degree by the great variability of Sigma_H2 inside 0.2*r25). The derived prescription predicts the total gas mass in our sub-sample of 17 non-interacting disk galaxies to within a factor of two. Given the short timescale over which star formation depletes the H2 content of these galaxies and the large range of r25 in our sample, there appears to be some mechanism leading to these largely self-similar radial gas distributions in nearby disk galaxies.
We fit a functional form for a universal ICM entropy profile to the scaled entropy profiles of a catalogue of X-ray galaxy cluster outskirts results, which are all relaxed cool core clusters at redshift below 0.25. We also investigate the functional form suggested by Lapi et al. and Cavaliere et al. for the behaviour of the entropy profile in the outskirts and find it to fit the data well outside 0.3r200 . We highlight the discrepancy in the entropy profile behaviour in the outskirts between observations and the numerical simulations of Burns et al., and show that the entropy profile flattening due to gas clumping calculated by Nagai & Lau is insufficient to match observations, suggesting that gas clumping alone cannot be responsible for all of the entropy profile flattening in the cluster outskirts. The entropy profiles found with Suzaku are found to be consistent with ROSAT, XMM-Newton and Planck results.
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