English

CHEX-MATE : turbulence in the ICM from X-ray surface brightness fluctuations

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2024-07-03 v1

Abstract

The intra-cluster medium is prone to turbulent motion that will contribute to the non-thermal heating of the gas, complicating the use of galaxy clusters as cosmological probes. Indirect approaches can estimate the intensity and structure of turbulent motions by studying the associated fluctuations in gas density and X-ray surface brightness. In this work, we want to constrain the gas density fluctuations at work in the CHEX-MATE sample to obtain a detailed view of their properties in a large population of clusters. We use a simulation-based approach to constrain the parameters of the power spectrum of density fluctuations, assuming a Kolmogorov-like spectrum and including the sample variance, further providing an approximate likelihood for each cluster. This method requires clusters to be not too disturbed, as fluctuations can originate from dynamic processes such as merging. Accordingly, we remove the less relaxed clusters (centroid shift w>0.02w>0.02) from our sample, resulting in a sample of 64 clusters. We define different subsets of CHEX-MATE to determine properties of density fluctuations as a function of dynamical state, mass and redshift, and investigate the correlation with the presence or not of a radio halo. We found a positive correlation between the dynamical state and density fluctuation variance, a non-trivial behaviour with mass and no specific trend with redshift or the presence/absence of a radio halo. The injection scale is mostly constrained by the core region. The slope in the inertial range is consistent with Kolmogorov theory. When interpreted as originating from turbulent motion, the density fluctuations in R500R_{500} yield an average Mach number of M3D0.4±0.2M_{3D}\simeq 0.4\pm 0.2, an associated non-thermal pressure support of Pturb/Ptot(9±6)% P_{turb}/P_{tot}\simeq (9\pm 6) \% or a hydrostatic mass bias bturb0.09±0.06b_{turb}\simeq 0.09\pm 0.06, in line with what is expected from the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.03064,
  title  = {CHEX-MATE : turbulence in the ICM from X-ray surface brightness fluctuations},
  author = {Simon Dupourqué and Nicolas Clerc and Etienne Pointecouteau and Dominique Eckert and Massimo Gaspari and Lorenzo Lovisari and Gabriel W. Pratt and Elena Rasia and Mariachiara Rossetti and Franco Vazza and Marco Balboni and Iacopo Bartalucci and Hervé Bourdin and Federico De Luca and Marco De Petris and Stefano Ettori and Simona Ghizzardi and Pasquale Mazzotta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03064},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in A&A, abstract slightly abridged for Arxiv