English

A Phenomenological Model for the Intracluster Medium that matches X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-12-08 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters are still challenged to produce a model for the intracluster medium that matches all aspects of current X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations. To facilitate such comparisons with future simulations and to enable realistic cluster population studies for modeling e.g., non-thermal emission processes, we construct a phenomenological model for the intracluster medium that is based on a representative sample of observed X-ray clusters. We create a mock galaxy cluster catalog based on the large collisionless N-body simulation MultiDark, by assigning our gas density model to each dark matter cluster halo. Our clusters are classified as cool-core and non cool-core according to a dynamical disturbance parameter. We demonstrate that our gas model matches the various observed Sunyaev-Zel'dovich and X-ray scaling relations as well as the X-ray luminosity function, thus enabling to build a reliable mock catalog for present surveys and forecasts for future experiments. In a companion paper, we apply our catalogs to calculate non-thermal radio and gamma-ray emission of galaxy clusters. We make our cosmologically complete multi-frequency mock catalogs for the (non-)thermal cluster emission at different redshifts publicly and freely available online through the MultiDark database (www.multidark.org).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.4793,
  title  = {A Phenomenological Model for the Intracluster Medium that matches X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations},
  author = {Fabio Zandanel and Christoph Pfrommer and Francisco Prada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.4793},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 8 pages, 4 figures. This article draws heavily from arXiv:1207.6410. Updated to match the published version. Latest version updated to match the Erratum published after the correction of the mock catalogs