English

On Escaping a Galaxy Cluster in an Accelerating Universe

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-11-18 v1

Abstract

We derive the escape velocity profile for an Einasto density field in an accelerating universe and demonstrate its physical viability by comparing theoretical expectations to both light-cone data generated from N-body simulations and archival data on 20 galaxy clusters. We demonstrate that the projection function (g(β)g(\beta )) is deemed physically viable only for the theoretical expectation that includes a cosmology-dependent term. Using simulations, we show that the inferred velocity anisotropy is more than 6{\sigma} away from the expected value for the theoretical profile that ignores the acceleration of the universe. In the archival data, we constrain the average velocity anisotropy parameter of a sample of 20 clusters to be β=0.2480.360+0.164\beta ={0.248}_{-0.360}^{+0.164} at the 68% confidence level. Lastly, we briefly discuss how our analytic model may be used as a novel cosmological probe based on galaxy clusters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.05816,
  title  = {On Escaping a Galaxy Cluster in an Accelerating Universe},
  author = {Alejo Stark and Christopher J. Miller and Daniel Gifford},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.05816},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures, accepted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:56:09.350Z