English

Non-thermal pressure support in X-COP galaxy clusters

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2019-01-09 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Galaxy clusters are the endpoints of structure formation and are continuously growing through the merging and accretion of smaller structures. Numerical simulations predict that a fraction of their energy content is not yet thermalized, mainly in the form of kinetic motions (turbulence, bulk motions). Measuring the level of non-thermal pressure support is necessary to understand the processes leading to the virialization of the gas within the potential well of the main halo and to calibrate the biases in hydrostatic mass estimates. We present high-quality measurements of hydrostatic masses and intracluster gas fraction out to the virial radius for a sample of 12 nearby clusters with available XMM-Newton and Planck data. We compare our hydrostatic gas fractions with the expected universal gas fraction to constrain the level of non-thermal pressure support. We find that hydrostatic masses require little correction and infer a median non-thermal pressure fraction of 6%\sim6\% and 10%\sim10\% at R500R_{500} and R200R_{200}, respectively. Our values are lower than the expectations of hydrodynamical simulations, possibly implying a faster thermalization of the gas. If instead we use the mass calibration adopted by the Planck team, we find that the gas fraction of massive local systems implies a mass bias 1b=0.85±0.051-b=0.85\pm0.05 for SZ-derived masses, with some evidence for a mass-dependent bias. Conversely, the high bias required to match Planck CMB and cluster count cosmology is excluded by the data at high significance, unless the most massive halos are missing a substantial fraction of their baryons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.00034,
  title  = {Non-thermal pressure support in X-COP galaxy clusters},
  author = {D. Eckert and V. Ghirardini and S. Ettori and E. Rasia and V. Biffi and E. Pointecouteau and M. Rossetti and S. Molendi and F. Vazza and F. Gastaldello and M. Gaspari and S. De Grandi and S. Ghizzardi and H. Bourdin and C. Tchernin and M. Roncarelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.00034},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures, A&A in press. This is one of three companion papers (including Ghirardini et al. and Ettori et al.) on the X-COP sample. X-COP data products are available for download on https://www.astro.unige.ch/xcop

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:40:33.701Z