We have analyzed the parallelism between the properties of galaxy clusters and early-type galaxies (ETGs) by looking at the similarity between their light profiles. We find that the equivalent luminosity profiles of all these systems in the vfilt band, once normalized to the effective radius re and shifted in surface brightness, can be fitted by the Sersics law Sers and superposed with a small scatter ($le0.3$ mag). By grouping objects in different classes of luminosity, the average profile of each class slightly deviates from the other only in the inner and outer regions (outside $0.1leq r/R_eleq 3$), but the range of values of $n$ remains ample for the members of each class, indicating that objects with similar luminosity have quite different shapes. The Illustris simulation reproduces quite well the luminosity profiles of ETGs, with the exception of in the inner and outer regions where feedback from supernovae and active galactic nuclei, wet and dry mergers, are at work. The total mass and luminosity of galaxy clusters as well as their light profiles are not well reproduced. By exploiting simulations we have followed the variation of the effective half-light and half-mass radius of ETGs up to $z=0.8$, noting that progenitors are not necessarily smaller in size than current objects. We have also analyzed the projected dark+baryonic and dark-only mass profiles discovering that after a normalization to the half-mass radius, they can be well superposed and fitted by the Sersics law.
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