No Arabic abstract
We use a cluster sample selected independently of the intracluster medium content with reliable masses to measure the mean gas mass fraction and its scatter, the biases of the X-ray selection on gas mass fraction, and the covariance between the X-ray luminosity and gas mass. The sample is formed by 34 galaxy clusters in the nearby ($0.050<z<0.135$) Universe, mostly with $14<log M_{500}/M_odot lesssim 14.5$, and with masses calculated with the caustic technique. First, we found that integrated gas density profiles have similar shapes, extending earlier results based on subpopulations of clusters such as those that are relaxed or X-ray bright for their mass. Second, the X-ray unbiased selection of our sample allows us to unveil a variegate population of clusters; the gas mass fraction shows a scatter of $0.17pm0.04$ dex, possibly indicating a quite variable amount of feedback from cluster to cluster, which is larger than is found in previous samples targeting subpopulations of galaxy clusters, such as relaxed or X-ray bright clusters. The similarity of the gas density profiles induces an almost scatterless relation between X-ray luminosity, gas mass, and halo mass, and modulates selection effects in the halo gas mass fraction: gas-rich clusters are preferentially included in X-ray selected samples. The almost scatterless relation also fixes the relative scatters and slopes of the $L_X-M$ and $M_{gas}-M$ relations and makes core-excised X-ray luminosities and gas masses fully covariant. Therefore, cosmological or astrophysical studies involving X-ray or SZ selected samples need to account for both selection effects and covariance of the studied quantities with X-ray luminosity/SZ strength.
One key ingredient in using galaxy clusters (GCs) as a precision cosmological probe in large X-ray surveys is to understand selection effects. The dependence of the X-ray emission on the square of the gas density leads to a predominant role of cool cores in the detection of GCs. The contribution of cool cores to the X-ray luminosity does not scale with GC mass and cosmology and therefore affects the use of X-ray GCs in producing cosmological constraints. One of the main science goals of the eROSITA mission is to constrain cosmology with a wide X-ray survey. We propose an eROSITA GC detection scheme that avoids the use of X-ray GC centers in detection. We calculate theoretical expectations and characterize the performance of this scheme by simulations. Performing realistic simulations of point sources (PSs) in survey mode we search for spatial scales where the extended signal is uncontaminated by the PS flux. We derive a combination of scales and thresholds, which result in a clean extended source catalog. We design the output of the GC detection which enables calibrating the core-excised luminosity using external mass measurements. We provide a way to incorporate the results of this calibration in the production of final core-excised luminosity. Similarly to other GC detection pipelines, we sample the flux - core radius detection space of our method and find many similarities with the pipeline used in the 400d survey. Both detection methods require large statistics on compact GCs, in order to reduce the contamination from PSs. The benefit of our pipeline consists in the sensitivity to the outer GC shapes, which are characterized by large core sizes with little GC to GC variation at a fixed total mass. GC detection through cluster outskirts improves the GC characterization using eROSITA survey data and is expected to yield well characterized GC catalogs having simple selection functions.
We explore how the behavior of galaxy cluster scaling relations are affected by flux-limited selection biases and intrinsic covariance among observable properties. Our models presume log-normal covariance between luminosity (L) and temperature (T) at fixed mass (M), centered on evolving, power-law mean relations as a function of host halo mass. Selection can mimic evolution; the lm and lt relations from shallow X-ray flux-limited samples will deviate from mass-limited expectations at nearly all scales while the relations from deep surveys ($10^{-14} cgsflux$) become complete, and therefore unbiased, at masses above $sims 2 times 10^{14} hinv msol$. We derive expressions for low-order moments of the luminosity distribution at fixed temperature, and show that the slope and scatter of the lt relation observed in flux-limited samples is sensitive to the assumed lt correlation coefficient. In addition, lt covariance affects the redshift behavior of halo counts and mean luminosity in a manner that is nearly degenerate with intrinsic population evolution.
We present a parametric analysis of the intracluster medium and gravitating mass distribution of a statistical sample of 20 galaxy clusters using the phenomenological cluster model of Ascasibar and Diego. We describe an effective scheme for the estimation of errors on model parameters and derived quantities using bootstrap resampling. We find that the model provides a good description of the data in all cases and we quantify the mean fractional intrinsic scatter about the best-fit density and temperature profiles, finding this to have median values across the sample of 2 and 5 per cent, respectively. In addition, we demonstrate good agreement between r500 determined directly from the model and that estimated from a core-excluded global spectrum. We compare cool core and non-cool core clusters in terms of the logarithmic slopes of their gas density and temperature profiles and the distribution of model parameters and conclude that the two categories are clearly separable. In particular, we confirm the effectiveness of the logarithmic gradient of the gas density profile measured at 0.04 r500 in differentiating between the two types of cluster.
We introduce a new test to study the Cosmological Principle with galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters exhibit a tight correlation between the luminosity and temperature of the X-ray-emitting intracluster medium. While the luminosity measurement depends on cosmological parameters through the luminosity distance, the temperature determination is cosmology-independent. We exploit this property to test the isotropy of the luminosity distance over the full extragalactic sky, through the normalization $a$ of the $L_X-T$ scaling relation and the cosmological parameters $Omega_m$ and $H_0$. We use two almost independent galaxy cluster samples: the ASCA Cluster Catalog (ACC) and the XMM Cluster Survey (XCS-DR1). Interestingly enough, these two samples appear to have the same pattern for $a$ with respect to the Galactic longitude. We also identify one sky region within $lsim (-15^o,90^o)$ (Group A) that shares very different best-fit values for $a$ for both samples. We find the deviation of Group A to be $2.7sigma$ for ACC and $3.1sigma$ for XCS-DR1. This tension is not relieved after excluding possible outliers or after a redshift conversion to the CMB frame is applied. Using also the HIFLUGCS sample, we show that a possible excess of cool-core clusters in this region, cannot explain the obtained deviations. Moreover, we tested for a dependence of the $L_X-T$ relation on supercluster environment. We indeed find a trend for supercluster members to be underluminous compared to field clusters. However, the fraction of supercluster members is similar in the different sky regions. Constraining $Omega_m$ and $H_0$ via the redshift evolution of $L_X-T$ and the luminosity distance, we obtain approximately the same deviation amplitudes as for $a$. The observed behavior of $Omega_m$ for the sky regions that coincide with the CMB dipole is similar to what was found with other cosmological probes as well.
Determining the scaling relations between galaxy cluster observables requires large samples of uniformly observed clusters. We measure the mean X-ray luminosity--optical richness (L_X--N_200) relation for an approximately volume-limited sample of more than 17,000 optically-selected clusters from the maxBCG catalog spanning the redshift range 0.1<z<0.3. By stacking the X-ray emission from many clusters using ROSAT All-Sky Survey data, we are able to measure mean X-ray luminosities to ~10% (including systematic errors) for clusters in nine independent optical richness bins. In addition, we are able to crudely measure individual X-ray emission from ~800 of the richest clusters. Assuming a log-normal form for the scatter in the L_X--N_200 relation, we measure sigma_ln{L}=0.86+/-0.03 at fixed N_200. This scatter is large enough to significantly bias the mean stacked relation. The corrected median relation can be parameterized by L_X = (e^alpha)(N_200/40)^beta 10^42 h^-2 ergs/s, where alpha = 3.57+/-0.08 and beta = 1.82+/-0.05. We find that X-ray selected clusters are significantly brighter than optically-selected clusters at a given optical richness. This selection bias explains the apparently X-ray underluminous nature of optically-selected cluster catalogs.